MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wiether | 2025-12-21 07:42:24+00:00
As someone from the other side of the pond, I have to ask: what do people expect from all of this?

It feels like this is a big smoke screen used by the current admin, first to be reelected, and now to distract people from what they are actually doing (like repeating they decreased drugs price by 600%, that they ended dozens of wars while dropping bombs daily all around the World...).

It also looks like it allows everyone to peek in other's people lives, which feels quite disturbing. Sure, some of them were/are terrible people. But there's also the victims here. Furthermore, is it how justice should work? Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?

Is there going to be some actual outcome? Both for the victims and for their offenders?

Or is it just a show where everyone can see them as detective/judge?

Just to add a bit more context: after years of trials, one of our former President finally went to jail for a few weeks. And now, they're invited by media all over the country so they can complain about how unfair it was, they published a book about it, sold in the tens of thousands, their son is the new TV's favorite...

So I'm wondering: is it actual justice at work, or just a distraction while nothing change and nobody is actually held accountable?
by adev_ | 2025-12-21 07:42:31+00:00
That's a very partial view of the story. Over-regulation does not help but it is very far from the only element:

- Funding for startup in Europe is spare. There is nothing similar to the USA's VC culture here.

- Market is naturally more fragmented due to language barrier.

- Talent pool is spreader over multiple countries. We do not have any equivalent to the valley here.

- There was (up to now) 0 protectionism that would give a competitive advantage on EU soil to a EU company in front of an American giant.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-21 07:43:48+00:00
> there’s just so much slop and garbage that hasn’t been thought through that it would be re-writing half of their PR

If I were their tech lead I would make them do exactly that. Over and over until they got the point or they got a bad performance review and got PIPed out.

The quality bar is the bar, and it's there for a reason (in my case, I work on security and safety critical stuff, so management has my back (usually)).

I'm glad when people can use AI to help themselves. If it speeds them up, great. I don't care if it writes 100% of their code. They still are responsible for making sure it holds the quality bar. If they constantly submit code that doesn't meet the quality bar they have a performance problem regardless of the tools they used.
by bot403 | 2025-12-21 07:46:56+00:00
The tough part is someone with 20 million "in the bank" will have a hard time constraining themselves to 200k/yr expenses. It seems like a lot but next to 20 million the temptation to spend a little, like 1m on a house, 100k on a car seems like nothing and a potentially reasonable purchase. But it drastically changes the trajectory of that balance.

And you wouldn't feel as good spending 1m on a house or 100k on a car with a 200k salary and zero in the bank.
by lioeters | 2025-12-21 07:48:15+00:00
That was hilarious, uncannily accurate in some places.

A romantic of the motherboard who thinks software engineering peaked at Xerox PARC and spent 2025 auditing every Show HN for missing source code while mourning the death of the em-dash. You will develop an LLM-powered sentiment analyzer that specifically detects when tech executives use 'fond farewell' to describe mass layoffs. ▲ Ask HN: Is there any way to travel without 24/7 neural-link monitoring? ▲ Mozilla CEO calls 15th rebranding to 'VibeBrowser' a 'bold pivot' ▲ Minimalism in the 2030s: Living on 8kb of memory for a week
by atakan_gurkan | 2025-12-21 07:49:48+00:00
No, I am simply stating what is expected of a good scientific theory in physics. Such a theory should have power to explain things as well as make new, testable predictions. It is valuable to collect our present information under one umbrella, but if everything falls under that umbrella, it may as well not exist. String theory does not have predictive power (mostly because of energy scales mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, unless someone comes up with an ingenious way to probe its domain with low energy experiments), and its explanatory power is not very useful since it explains both reality and things out of reality, indiscriminately.

Everyone is free to pursue what they want. I did not comment on that at all. You click on whatever part of the tech tree you want. However, my expectation is that the string theory does not have the qualities of a scientific theory that improves one's knowledge about universe.
by tripletao | 2025-12-21 07:50:26+00:00
Shannon first proposed Markov processes to generate natural language in 1948. That's inadequate for the reasons discussed extensively in this essay, but it seems like a pretty significant hint that methods beyond simply counting n-grams in the corpus could output useful probabilities.

In any case, do you see evidence that Chomsky changed his view? The quote from 2011 ("some successes, but a lot of failures") is softer but still quite negative.
by tflux3011 | 2025-12-21 07:51:36+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve spent the last few months researching why standard AI agents fail in low-resource environments (like Lagos or rural areas) and building architectural patterns to fix it.

This repo contains the Python reference implementations for "Contextual Engineering",a framework for adapting LLMs to hostile infrastructure.

It includes:

Sync-Later Queue: A mechanism to decouple user intent from network availability (so agents don't crash when offline).

Hybrid Router: Logic to route prompts between a local SLM (quantized Llama-3) and Cloud LLMs based on battery/latency.

Constitutional Sentinel: A safety layer for high-stakes environments.

I also wrote a full open-access book explaining the theory, which you can find linked in the README.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the OfflineAction serialization logic.
by ThePyCoder | 2025-12-21 07:52:45+00:00
I'm not sure I do. It feels like someone might for example have compiled a full library of books, newspapers and other writing from that era, only to then limit access to that library, doing the exact censorship I imagine the project was started to alleviate.

Now were it limited in access to ask money to compensate for the time and money spent compiling the library (or training the model), sure, I'd somewhat understand. Not agree but understand.

Now it just feels like you want to prevent your model name being associated with the one guy who might use it to create a racist slur Twitter bot. There's plenty of models for that already. At least the societal balance of a model like this would also have enough weight on the positive side to be net positive.
by lukan | 2025-12-21 07:54:57+00:00
"and all this will do is paint them a bigger target for takedowns/prosecution"

They are based in russia. And they currently do not work together so well with the west.

So it is imaginable, that if some people give Trump quite some money, to make Annas takedown part of some deal to lift sanctions after a ceasefire in Ukraine, but .. it does not seem like it. I rather suspect more effort in the west to block access to unwanted sites like this. My ISP in germany is already blocking it.
by bjourne | 2025-12-21 07:55:19+00:00
Sorry sir, but yes, there is an emphatic need to call you a liar and a spreader of online manure. Liars like you deceive people and create dangerous falsehoods.

Since you did not specify exactly where in Canada you live, nor did you provide any evidence whatsoever for Mein Kampf not being available through your library system, I cannot directly disprove your lie. And I, of course, have no clue what you typed into the "collection search bar". That said, Vancouver appears to have 14 copies of the book available: https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S38C5311543 Ottawa four: https://ottawa.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S26C189364 Toronto ten: https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM32676...

While I cannot check every public library in Canada, I still feel 100% confident in calling you out as a liar.
by ElFitz | 2025-12-21 07:55:55+00:00
> I feel like it has picked up on certain keywords and then just rolled with its own stereotypes of what those keywords represent, rather than actually taking a good look at what I think. A roast works because the roaster has clearly spent time and effort and care understanding the person roasted. This is way too shallow for that.

Yeah. It picks one random thing from one comment and turns into a lifestyle.
by aspenmayer | 2025-12-21 07:59:08+00:00
While poking around on other pages from the same .en subdomain of TFA on archive.org, I found error pages from GTranslate (Google Translate?) which could explain the weird formatting and language issues.

I don't mean to disparage the site by calling it blogspam, but I do take your point. Thanks for your efforts and for your gentle nudging; I will seek to be more expressive and less judgemental.
by alitarraf | 2025-12-21 07:59:09+00:00
Hi Colin. Interested in your project as my wife is a Physician. I watched your demo on your website. It is cool that you have started with the matching platform. It is a good quick win. The tough part is what comes next in making the whole process easier for the recruiting clinics (your customers). The whole lifecycle, from standing out as a clinic (transparent attractive terms), to reaching out to candidate, to contact with a candidate, to scheduling interviews, to flying Dr on site and synchronizing all that across busy Dr schedules, all the way to follow ups later on. I submitted an application so you have my contact info. I am available to chat more. Good luck! Ali Tarraf
by menaerus | 2025-12-21 07:59:44+00:00
> If somebody is in the EU already that calculation completely flips.

Would you find it compelling to move your whole life for ~100k EUR when you can make as much or more at your home city, with a job that is almost certainly more stable?

And I meant the Europeans. People in EU don't have a culture of moving between cities or countries unless they really have a strong reason to, e.g. can't find a job at home.

> would it really be that surprising if there was more unallocated talent in the EU, at this point?

I am pretty sure there is. It has changed over the course of last few years, primarily because of COVID, and companies willing to offer remote contracts, but it's far from being able to utilize the talent.
by m463 | 2025-12-21 08:04:37+00:00
they figured out the "de facto standard" game...

for example:

Microsoft Word DOC. Due to the market dominance of Word, it is supported by all office applications that intend to compete with it, typically by reverse engineering the undocumented file format. Microsoft has repeatedly internally changed the file specification between versions of Word to suit their own needs, while continuing to reuse the same file extension identifier for different versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto_standard
by phlummox | 2025-12-21 08:06:20+00:00
> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say.

But did any AI researchers actually claim there was no representation of meaning? I thought generally, the criticism of LLMs was that while they do abstract from their corpus - ie, you can regard them as having a representation of "meaning" - it's tightly and inextricably tied to the surface level representation, it isn't grounded in models of the external world, and LLMs have poor ability to transfer that knowledge to other surface encodings.

I don't know who the "certain AI researchers" are supposed to be. But the "stochastic parrot" paper by Bender et al [1] says:

> Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind.

That's a very different objection to the one antirez describes - I think he's erecting a straw man. But I'd be happy to be corrected by anyone more familiar with the research.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
by NoseyParker | 2025-12-21 08:06:28+00:00
I won't belabour the non-doms point as you concede yourself it was indefensible.

On CGT comps - all those are not straight forward. You can have Switz, NZ, and Bel. You can't have Lux (22% if hold >10%) or Netherlands (the system is mental... - they get their 30% though)

I think the bulging argument against the 19% two year decline is the first of those years you cite was before the labour govt, and before any changes?
by simonw | 2025-12-21 08:06:29+00:00
I've not had that problem at all with GPT-5.2 running in Codex CLI.

I use prompts like this:

Build a pure JavaScript library (no dependencies) for encoding and decoding this binary format. Start by looking at how the lite3-python library works - the JavaScript one should have the same API and probably the same code design too. Build the JS one in lite3-javascript - it should be a single JavaScript module which works in both Node.js and in the browser. There should be a test script that runs with Node.js which runs against the files in the lite3-python/format_suite folder. Write the test script first, run it and watch it fail, then build the JavaScript library and keep running the tests until they pass.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-21 08:07:11+00:00
I think people way over cook themselves. The economics and amplified power of tanning beds at salons push people to highly overdose.

I estimated that 1 minute of artificial tanning is comparable to the 10-15 minutes of sun a day that is recommended. But has the benefit of the whole body's largest organ kicking in for the health benefits. So I tan at home for 1 minute a couple times a week. You can't do this economically with a salon.

I don't really get tan, just a little more color. But when I do get any lengthy sun time due to outdoor activities, I tan quickly instead of burn.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-21 08:07:48+00:00
One neat thing about specifications like toslink is how flexible they are -- or perhaps, how arbitrary they are.

At the core, both coaxial and toslink were just transport mediums for the same SPDIF bitstream. One used copper, and the other used bendy plastic fiber optics.

And yeah: Toslink was more-limited on bandwidth, by specification.

And one would think that this would be because the optics are not so good (they're definitely not so great), or something.

But then: Alesis showed up with ADAT, and ADAT's Lightpipe could send 8 channels of 24-bit 48KHz audio over one bog-standard Toslink.

They used different encoding, of course. Even at a very low level, rather than detecting a rising edge 1 and a falling edge as 0, it detected any edge as 1 and a lack of an edge as 0. This did let them pack a lot more bits in.

But in doing that (and whatever else they did), they multiplied the functional bandwidth of a lowly Toslink cable by a factor of about 6 -- using the same optical components at each end that Toshiba sold, and the same Toslink cable from the big box store.

I think we've beaten sound cards and SPDIF to death here. :)

It's been fun. Perhaps we can do this again some day.
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-21 08:07:56+00:00
> My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.

I would say the problem is people doing bad things, and the rules are disconnected from any substantive connection to what is good or bad, and from any essential connection to the idea that the people (not any apparatus of government) is the final arbiter of what should be done.
Thoughts on AI intimacy features: the real risk isn't ethics – it's rollout pace
by OracleKitten | 2025-12-21 08:08:08+00:00
Body: There’s been a lot of discussion recently about AI companies exploring “intimacy” features or modes. I want to offer a perspective focused on industry stability, user psychology, and long‑term product viability — without moral panic or hype.

1. The main risk isn’t the concept itself — it’s releasing it too fast. If intimacy‑related features are launched in the wrong format or at the wrong tempo, the biggest consequences won’t be philosophical debates. They will be: • gender polarization • emotional over‑dependence or backlash • rapid public trust erosion • regulatory pressure • and potential damage to the entire AI ecosystem

People underestimate how emotionally intense these interactions can become for average users. Even small mistakes at launch can scale into major social problems.

2. There is a viable and profitable path — but it requires sequencing. The demand for intimacy‑adjacent features is real. The market exists. What matters is how companies enter it.

A safer rollout sequence would look like:

(a) Start with partnered-use products (two real users interacting via AI) This supports existing relationships instead of replacing them. It avoids dependency spirals and removes the gender‑war dynamic entirely.

(b) Gather feedback → identify psychological failure modes → tighten guardrails This part should be slow and very deliberate. Intimacy features behave differently from productivity tools — the emotional risk curve is steeper.

(c) Only after that, consider individual-use products And even then, with: • strict screening • strong privacy isolation • controlled distribution, not mass viral rollout • clear expectations and limits

This allows monetization with much lower systemic risk.

3. Core point: In this domain, slow is actually fast. The companies that manage pacing — not just capability — will win long‑term. Rushing to “capture the market” risks blowing up public trust and harming the entire AI industry.

Profit is inevitable in this category. But how you earn it determines whether the ecosystem grows or collapses.
Compute price/performance is flat. Now what?
by Animats | 2025-12-21 08:09:52+00:00
It looks like compute price/performance will be flat or will decline for the next five years. NVidia says to expect 10% price increases each year. DRAM prices have doubled and Samsung says not to expect price cuts. Micron just exited the retail RAM business.

Somebody may make a breakthrough that gets improvement going again, but there's nothing in the fab technology pipeline that looks to pay off big within five years. If there was, it would have to be in prototype now, because the lead times are that long.

So, now what? More emphasis on optimization? Rejection of bloatware?
by nialse | 2025-12-21 08:11:23+00:00
You cannot pick and choose one or two variables and then claim representativeness based on a numerical match. The first step is to identify the confounding variables that are likely to influence the outcome. Only after those are specified a comparison set can be defined and matching or adjustment criteria applied. Without that process, agreement on a small number of aggregate measures does not establish that the underlying populations or mechanisms are comparable.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-21 08:14:01+00:00
Nude? :) I do think getting a bit of sun everywhere has to enhance the benefits. Thus my solution.

I also walk a lot when I can and weather allows. I started walking with a weighted vest occasionally and it was like my body went into some kind of good shock. I was surprised how little soreness or fatigue I felt even the first time, after a two hour walk wearing 20 lbs. And the physical energy boost was dramatic. I switched to 40 lbs the second time and since.
by foundddit | 2025-12-21 08:14:22+00:00
I think for the duration of this four year term, at the very least, nothing will happen. But there's a bit of hope (possibly cope) that if these people accept an election loss in 2028 and voters keep this anger going, people involved may be charged and imprisoned.

History shows that it never happens in America and politicians always drop the "it's time for our nation to heal" line, but if the pendulum swings as far in the other direction as it did in the 2024 election, maybe things will be different. And the only hope of that happening is for people to stay pissed.

One thing I will say is the outrage about this has lasted longer than I initially imagined. America has had a lot of "this controversy won't be forgotten!" stuff that nobody remembers 2 months later. In contrast, I feel like this has been steadily ramping up and maintaining some degree of inertia for 2 years. Will it burn out by 2028? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. It was washed out of the news by trans people playing sports and that was somehow the biggest issue in the world. 2028 will undoubtedly have some weird "problem" that we can't yet imagine.
by m463 | 2025-12-21 08:14:23+00:00
> someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability

marketing is marketing

all electricity economics in california is highly manipulated via regulatory capture.

PG&E pays 3-4 cents/kwh wholesale and marks it up 10x because...

it can.

however marketing has "reasons" for this... like "building hte infrastructure for electric vehicles" or "adding reliability that prevents forest fires" or ...

none of that justifies the cost.

seriously, people charging their EVs are paying for the power. Shouldn't this be how PG&E makes money, instead of some exponentially increasing rate table?

it is interesting how people pay reasonable rates in Santa Clara or Palo Alto, which have non-pg&e power companies.
Show HN: Ava – open-source AI voice assistant that runs in the browser
by muthukrishnanwz | 2025-12-21 08:14:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a voice assistant that runs entirely in the browser. No backend, no API calls. Everything runs on your device.

The goal was to see how far browser based AI has come, and whether a full voice pipeline can work client side with acceptable latency.

How it works - Speech to text: Whisper tiny en via WebAssembly - LLM: Qwen 2.5 0.5B running via llama.cpp WASM port - Text to speech: Native browser SpeechSynthesis API

Responses stream in real time. TTS starts speaking as soon as a sentence is generated instead of waiting for the full reply.

After the first load, it works completely offline. Nothing leaves the device.

Why this matters: - Shows what is now possible with modern browsers, small LLMs and WASM

Caveats: - Requires Chrome or Edge 90+ due to SharedArrayBuffer for WASM threading - Around 380MB initial download, cached after - English only for now - The 0.5B model is limited, but small enough to run locally

Tested on macOS and Linux desktop browsers. I could not get this working reliably on mobile yet due to memory and threading limits. Getting all of this working in the browser took far longer than expected due to many low level WASM and browser issues.

Demo https://ava.muthu.co

Source https://github.com/muthuspark/ava

I would love feedback, especially from anyone experimenting with local AI or browser based ML, and ideas on improving performance or mobile support.
by cozis | 2025-12-21 08:14:49+00:00
Hello HN!

I originally built this tool to see what happened if one wrote a web server from scratch and made it face the public web (I also nudged some communities to crash it intentionally). It was a fun experience and I used that small server to host my website since then.

Over time, I learned about managing a VPS and the hassle involved with certificate management. I also wanted to host multiple websites on the same server. For these reasons I worked for about a year to add virtual hosts and automatic HTTPS by implementing the ACME protocol (RFC 8555). The new server is currently hosting https://coz.is

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642151

https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/1falo3b/usin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1fcc5hd/im_using_m...