MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dkarl | 2025-12-09 14:50:51+00:00
I feel like the elephant in the room in this post is property-based testing. I dislike using fixtures for all the reasons stated in the post, and when it seems like I might need really them, I reach for property-based testing instead.

"Generators" for property-based testing might be similar to what the author is calling "factories." Generators create values of a given type, sometimes with particular properties, and can be combined to create generators of other types. (The terminology varies from one library to another. Different libraries use the terms "generators," "arbitraries," and "strategies" in slightly different and overlapping ways.)

For example, if you have a generator for strings and a generator for non-negative integers, it's trivial to create a generator for a type Person(name, age).

Generators can also be filtered. For example, if you have a generator for Account instances, and you need active Account instances in your test, you can apply a filter to the base generator to select only the instances where _.isActive is true.

Once you have a base generator for each type you need in your tests, the individual tests become clear and succinct. There is a learning curve for working with generators, but as a rule, the test code is very easy to read, even if it's tricky to write at first.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-09 14:50:52+00:00
To be fair, he did do that for kilos to orbit via reusable rocket, so there was a moment when everyone went "hmm maybe there is a TBM equivalent of the Falcon 9".

But presumably it turned out that actually Herrenknecht and Hitachi aren't stupid, whereas, say, Boeing had been leaving opportunity for radical cost reduction on the table.
by perlgeek | 2025-12-09 14:51:02+00:00
For a database-driven application with sqlalchemy, I've found mixer[0] to be pretty helpful. It gives you an easy way to generate an object, and it automatically creates dummy-objects that your object depends on.

You can also supply defaults and name schemes for individual columns.

For business logic, I prefer to have it structured in a way that it doesn't need the database for testing, but loading and searching stuff from the DB also needs to be tested, and for those, mixer strikes a really good balance. You only need to specify the attributes that are relevant for the test, and you don't need shared fixtures between many tests.

[0]: https://pypi.org/project/mixer/
by subscribed | 2025-12-09 14:51:09+00:00
Well, only it isn't.

Very old, unpatched and rooted devices can fairly easily pass device integrity check.

It primarily assures the software vendor that the phone is running Google buttplug in the privileged mode.

Remember, handsets running on ANCIENT versions of Android with no patches for years. Whilst seems to be important to raise under the Forbes article (rightly) fussing about a couple of zero-days.

"Custom roms" (whatever that means) can easily spoof the checks in the specific situation (mainly hardware that allows for several things).
by cryptonector | 2025-12-09 14:51:12+00:00
This is another one of those apocalyptic posts about AI. It might actually be true. I recommend reading The Phools, by Stanislav Lem -- it's a very short story, and you can find free copies of it online.

Also maybe go out for some fresh air. Maybe knowledge work will go down for humans, but plumbing and such will take much longer since we'll need dextrous robots.
by danvc | 2025-12-09 14:51:35+00:00
Trevally has the data encrypted and, in order to get authorized by Gmail or even Microsoft, we need to face a hard process to show them that we're following the requirements to keep the user data safe... apart from the data being stored in the cloud and other elements around it.

So, the idea behind this platform is a way to keep you email and other elements related to that (contacts, for example), synced and backed up.. and not only that, but also share informations about your data that most of these solutions doesn't offer.

Maybe, moving the servers to outside the US would avoid this 4th Amendment situation in respect to the user data.

But, I'm not sure how people are so scared about security but they're everywhere, in social platforms, using smartphones, etc. I really don't believe that there's a safety place in this WWW, but, we're trying to do that, at least, for contacts and emails, attachments.
by projektfu | 2025-12-09 14:51:37+00:00
I think it is likely that there is a slow/high latency part of the connection. This is usually represented to the user by showing a loading spinner or something like that. However, it is using some partial reloading in the background instead of just following a link, and as a result is not letting the browser tell me that it is loading, and it doesn't have any sign of loading presented otherwise.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 14:52:07+00:00
> And also at the same time a good reminder for everyone to find a browser that supports JPEG XL

That's probably furthest down on my list of features I look for in browser, where the top two are "Not run by a for-profit company living on extracting data from users" and "Can have tabs vertically in sidebar in a tree-based structured format".
by daveguy | 2025-12-09 14:52:09+00:00
This is a good point. I completely relate to the statement that "social media is a plague on society." But you have a good point -- it's not so much the digitization of a social network as the algorithms that are hyper-optimized to steal attention and sell advertising. Maybe it's not the age that should be regulated, but the algorithm. Whether algorithm regulation should be age dependent is another question. Personally I don't think it should be age dependent. Or... Dear Social Media Companies, F your attention hijacking, skinnerbox advertising and engagement crack regardless of how old your victim is.
by rkozik1989 | 2025-12-09 14:52:14+00:00
The benefit of having a team of QA engineers create tests is their differing perspectives, so with LLMs being trained to act like affirmation engines you have to wonder how that impacts the test cases it creates. Its the problem of LLMs being miserable at critiques manifesting itself in a different way.

However, in saying that, I am by no means an AI hater, but rather I just want models to be better than they currently are. I am tired of the tech demos and benchmark stats that don't really mean much aside from impressing someone who's not in a critical thinking mindset.
by squeedles | 2025-12-09 14:52:36+00:00
It's the all you can eat buffet effect. Pay the price and don't have to worry about shipping, can watch (some) streaming without having to worry about paying, and whatever else they decide to roll into their monopoly black hole today.

Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.

edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.
by alecco | 2025-12-09 14:53:07+00:00
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.

Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).

> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.

But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
by BoxOfRain | 2025-12-09 14:53:15+00:00
> Calling it "training LLM" is a bit misleading. This is a small GPT-2-sized model (~160M params), while the "L" in "LLM" stands for large...

I've always felt the natural way of referring to smaller LLMs would be Medium Language Models and Small Language Models, but I guess MLM is an inauspicious acronym.
by superkuh | 2025-12-09 14:53:15+00:00
>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.

It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.

What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
by Aldipower | 2025-12-09 14:53:48+00:00
You assume that cassettes are all mass-produced artifacts. But that's not true. Many of them have a limited edition of perhaps 50 copies. But what I wanted to say was something completely different. People like to own art in a physical way. But to implicitly tell someone whether or not they should own something made of plastic is, in my opinion, crossing a line.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-09 14:54:22+00:00
There were also automats, automated restaurants serving all food through a vending machine (or more accurately, wall). Classically all for a single fixed price (a nickle).

These are featured in several cultural references, such as the 1962 Delbert Mann film That Touch of Mink, and PDQ Bach's "Concerto for Horn and Hardart" (being named after a prominent New York City automat chain).

Mink: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Y3GXMB4VPY8>

Concerto: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NT6bxlnS1Is>
by sokoloff | 2025-12-09 14:54:22+00:00
For most everything I'm giving as Christmas gifts this year, Amazon has the best (often tied for the best) price. Things from Apple are cheaper on Amazon than from Apple (Airpods Pro 3, M4 Air, etc.)

Predictable delivery, easy/generous customer service, best/tied-for-best price, excellent selection. I'm not sure which part of that is uncompetitive...

(If you know a better price on Airpods 3 Pro or a base M4 Air, do let me know as I'm always happy to save money.)
by nemo | 2025-12-09 14:54:49+00:00
The claims about extreme complexity of the Late Roman/Byzantine state came into the popular imagination by Enlightenment and other Western thinkers who were deeply biased against the late Romans due to a long history of cultural conflict. The OP is completely correct here, the reddit comment is an extremely incomplete story. It notes that the Roman state was more complex than other Medieval states (correct), but to say that it was "too" complex is a culturally based judgment, not a fact. The origin of the negative cultural judgment about that complexity waen't coming from the Romans, they were coming from the Franks, Venetians, and later Western Europeans who in large part were repeating the old prejudices going back to the schism, but also justifying their own conquest and abuses of of the Roman people.
by bluGill | 2025-12-09 14:54:56+00:00
That depends on what state the fixture sets up and when you run them. That state becomes something you expect all tests to handle, if you change the fixture state and test breaks you should be fixing the production code - not the test code - to handle that change. Of course in reality I can well believe it is a tests data conflict in most cases (someone with the name "test user one" already is in the database at a different address..) and this is something you need to ensure doesn't happen.

I have a fixture that sets our database to the initial install state. This works for me because we are an embedded system where every month we ship a bunch more new systems and so code needs to see that initial install state, if we change the initial state (which we do all the time) and a test breaks we want to know and fix that since customers will see that situation.

However if you run on a server in a data center I could well believe you will never again see any specific state and so a fixture probably isn't right. Maybe ideally every test would take a snapshot of your current production database and test against that (with whatever additional data you add for the test) - if a customer enters data that breaks a test that is a "all hands on deck" to fix the code before customers hit that code path. Maybe - I don't work in this space and so I'm just speculating what you need.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-09 14:55:13+00:00
> Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing [...]

Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing about the automation / technology apocalypse for humans in the past 100 years that it's hard to catalog it -- much of what I have read or seen go by in the vein I've totally forgotten.

It's not remotely a surprise to see this amp up with AI.
by delichon | 2025-12-09 14:55:16+00:00
I feel the same way about a smoking. I'm opposed to both smoking and a ban on smoking. It's not because I don't think an effective ban would be healthful, but because I believe that the concentrated power needed for it is a greater danger. It's the same argument that I believe supports the first amendment: people saying evil shitty false things is a lesser evil than the power needed to stop them from saying them.
Show HN: I made a nice Anki-app for iOS
by quantized_state | 2025-12-09 14:55:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently got the AnkiMobile app for iOS for Mandarin. It was buggy and feature-lacking in my opinion, so I made a nice looking Anki-compatible alternative app, with more features.

It uses a tuned FSRS5 algorithm and supports image occlusion out of the box. You can import your existing Anki decks into it or create a new one. Pretty quick to add cards with the image feature.

I'm using it right now and will add more to it so let me know what you think.

FYI, it has a one-off purchase of $14.99 to unlock it for lifetime (no taksies backsies) after a test period of seven days.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-09 14:55:25+00:00
> I’m not saying you’re wrong for feeling that way

I mean I'm not feeling any particular way; I don't have a problem with the neighbours using it. I'm somewhat surprised that it makes sense for them, but each to their own. Myself, I just shop on the way home from work (my walk brings me past one of the supermarkets).
by 9rx | 2025-12-09 14:55:52+00:00
> The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast, suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it

I know it can be hard for programmers stuck in a programming language mindset, especially where one learned about software from "Learn to code" movements, but as this is natural language, technically it only draws what I intended for it to draw. If you wish to interpret it another way, cool. Much like as in told in the Carly Simon song of similar nature, it makes no difference to me.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-09 14:56:00+00:00
How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.

This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-09 14:56:15+00:00
iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.

Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.
by thingortwo | 2025-12-09 14:56:26+00:00
I'm not dismissive of AI but I still do the whole "copy and paste" into chatbot approach simply because I use it as a boilerplate or research tool where the intent or workflows are already established and is targeted so it doesn't really matter how it writes since I can "parse" it's output quickly kind like an advance version of vscode saved snippet templates. I never use it do software design for me since this actually requires you understanding the problem but I can still use it to research existing stuff which is pretty cool.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-09 14:57:08+00:00
> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...]

Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange?

If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-09 14:57:11+00:00
Why do people keep using LLMs as algorithms?

LLMs are not calculators. If you want a calculator use a calculator. Hell, have your LLM use a calculator.

>That's precisely why digital computers won out over analog ones, the fact that they are deterministic.

I mean, no not really, digital computers are far easier to build and far more multi-purpose (and technically the underlying signals are analog).

Again, if you have a deterministic solution that is 100% correct all the time, use it, it will be cheaper than an LLM. People use LLMs because there are problems that are either not deterministic or the deterministic solution uses more energy than will ever be available in the local part of our universe. Furthermore a lot of AI (not even LLMs) use random noise at particular steps as a means to escape local maxima.
by netsharc | 2025-12-09 14:57:11+00:00
For example, interview from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMifQvuN08

When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill them (because of course these geniuses don't understand derivatives)...
by retsibsi | 2025-12-09 14:57:21+00:00
Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-09 14:57:32+00:00
Pre-2001 was... different.

I was stopped by the metal detector at an airport. I didn't know why. Then the guy in the lane next to me said, "Oh, I'm wearing steel-toed boots."

I said, "Oh, I am too." (True)

Without any further questions or checking, they let us both through.

"That? It's just a giant, red, spherical Christmas ornament, with a string to hang it by, that happens to smell of gunpowder... and the monogram 'TNT' on the side."
by Y_Y | 2025-12-09 14:57:46+00:00
You remind me of my favourite bit of Windows software ever[0]. It made the desktop feel really alive with things like can-can girls and humanoid fish flying around your "living wallpaper".

Then again it was named Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, so maybe it's not such a good idea for the default environment of a general-purpose operating system.

[0] https://www.mobygames.com/game/1975/monty-pythons-complete-w...
by spi | 2025-12-09 14:57:54+00:00
A separate comment about conclusions about why they are worse than OpenAI GPT2 - which to me feel to be missing the point.

One main point is batch size - I'd agree with Gemini here. Batch size <= 5 with 1024 seq len is really tiny. Nowadays models are trained with effective batch size of millions of tokens in total. Of course, this won't fit into memory, one uses gradient accumulations to that purpose, again as mentioned by Gemini.

Training duration is definitely also a reason - models do get better over time, otherwise people wouldn't train so long wasting millions :-) just how long for optimality is unclear, but certainly < 2 days is not optimal even at this "small" scale.

The optimizer could also play a role. As the author mentions, a fixed learning rate is hardly optimal, it is typically both increased in the beginning ("warm up", but that's for stability, if training works without, that's not an issue) and scaled down at the end ("cool down" - that is, annealing, with cosine as mentioned in the article). This generally squeezes out a bit more performance. Also, while it's true that dropout was used back then (might be useful for many epochs, likely only harmful for < 1 epoch), using _both_ dropout _and_ weight_decay > 0, as the author does, is probably wrong and makes training too slow & careful to get good results. Also, even if used, a "good" implementation of weight decay should skip some layers like embeddings and biases (GPT2 did that, and it's relatively important to do so).

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that using mixed precision and TF32 has absolutely no downsides. It's really standard nowadays to use either mixed precision (FP16 gradients + FP32 base weights) or directly BF16 ("brain" float 16, a bit like the TF32 described there, but with only 16 bits) and I have almost never seen either one fail... and when it does, it typically fails spectacularly, with NaN losses or the model degenerating to trivial performance.
Show HN: A 3-Tool ETL Pipeline for CSV/TSV/Excel/Parquet in Go
by mimixbox | 2025-12-09 14:58:30+00:00
I built a small trilogy of Go tools:

- fileprep — preprocessing & validation using struct tags (trim, replace, normalize, etc.)

- fileframe — a lightweight, immutable DataFrame for filtering, mapping, grouping

- filesql — run SQL directly on CSV/TSV/LTSV/Excel/Parquet (SQLite under the hood)

Repos:

- https://github.com/nao1215/fileprep

- https://github.com/nao1215/fileframe

- https://github.com/nao1215/filesql
by bitpush | 2025-12-09 14:58:30+00:00
Oh look, another Ed Citron word vomit.

The core argument is technical. NVIDIA is not Enron, in a criminal way. Enron was cooking the books, while NVIDIA is a legitimate monopoly with a product that is in high demand. And the demand, the author claims, is artificial.

So many words for what is effectively one or two short paragraphs.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-09 14:58:48+00:00
I think the qualities of a cassette mentioned have clearly helped with the mixtape model. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't also a product of that particular era.

It certainly depends on geographical zones, too, but I remember people burning audio cds for quite a while, and taking them on the go with portable players. This was quite widespread before portable mp3 players became common.

Hell, where I grew up, cassettes were still in regular use until the end of the 90s, and mixtapes had grown increasingly rare.