MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-08 02:13:34+00:00
> However, unlike the log-based approach, this does not ensure monotonicity across multiple concurrent requests.

Is this a functional requirement when a system is multi-process? Specifically, a single multi-threaded process could provide monotonic guarantees across all messages processed.

Once 2+ processes are introduced, it is impossible to guarantee monotonicity globally unless a SPoT (a.k.a. "queue") is used for delivery due to variations in message delivery times, performance of machines running each process, etc. An additional implication is there is no provable way to determine if a message received by process "A" logically precedes a message received by process "B" without authoritative information in the messages.

In short, an answer which generalizes the question:

Can we get the space efficiency for consumers when using monotonically increasing idempotency keys, without hampering performance of multi-threaded producers?

Is to use the "hi/low" algorithm for both a single process multi-threaded solution, by only needing the process to allocate the "hi" value periodically and provide verifiable monotonic values, and also for multi-process (potentially multi-threaded as well) solutions, which ensures each process does not produce duplicate keys while providing a per-process partial ordering guarantee.
by chickensong | 2025-12-08 02:16:06+00:00
Not discounting mental health effects of advertising assault, but both of those things can have direct life-threatening impact, so I'm not sure they're a valid comparison to choosing a refrigerator. You don't even need certification to be an auto-mechanic in my country. That said, the previous response about subsidized refrigerators forced me to reconsider the issue as a purchasing choice.

I still don't think it's realistic to expect the software engineers implementing questionable features to refuse to do so, or be punished for following orders. Sure some might choose to quit and work elsewhere, but their seat will be filled by someone else.

If it's not a consumer choice issue, in a future where most refrigerators are subsidized by ads, I could see a case for regulation, but my hopes are low tbh. We already have ads everywhere, so why would an appliance like a fridge or washing machine get special treatment? Personally I'd love a world where there's no ads except in dedicated opt-in places, both physical and digital. I have zero faith I'll ever see that.

How do you propose we stop our impending doom? Where are your proposed consequences coming from? I think this is an interesting social issue, I'm open to having my mind changed, and I'm trying to have a real discussion, but if you've just got more snide "bro" comments, we can leave it here.
by mjmsmith | 2025-12-08 02:16:13+00:00
> And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of > changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.

Foolishly, some of us still hoped Apple was better than that. And definitely better than this:

"Apple is bringing in Meta chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead to lead government affairs after Adams retires and serve as its new general counsel."
by HarryHirsch | 2025-12-08 02:16:32+00:00
The decision to implement benefit cliffs is absolutely intentional, because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp, and maybe 10 % of the population rely on those. Obamacare subsidies are phased out gradually, because half the country relies on Obamacare, and if there were issues around Obamacare, that would have repercussions at the ballot box.

It serves to have an underclass that politicians can dump on, it seems.
by faidit | 2025-12-08 02:16:59+00:00
I mean, that person actually got yelled at and had to leave the store. Some are more sensitive than others and just the fear of an unpleasant interaction is enough for some people. I've let small discrepancies slide just because the staff looked overworked and I didn't want to make them stop what they're doing, run down to the aisle and check prices and get their supervisor. For most I think it's just a time thing. It isn't worth a couple dollars to commit to an unpredictable amount of time going back and forth and waiting for a manager. I salute those lions like your MIL who stand their ground and fight back but there are also many, maybe most, who are just in a hurry or want to avoid confrontation.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-08 02:17:18+00:00
3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.
by bamboozled | 2025-12-08 02:17:21+00:00
I use LLMs heavily for work, I have done so for about 6 months. I see almost zero "thought" going on and a LOT of pattern matching. You can use this knowledge to your advantage if you understand this. If you're relying on it to "think", disaster will ensue. At least that's been my experience.

I've completely given up on using LLMs for anything more than a typing assistant / translator and maybe an encyclopedia when I don't care about correctness.
by temp0826 | 2025-12-08 02:17:51+00:00
What support did you need? Sounds like it's only a matter of checking what's blocked in the logs and adding some exceptions to the allow list?

I'm pretty aggressive with the block lists I have selected and expect to fiddle with it lots, but I have a second (much more "reasonable") profile that family uses and it works great (still catches a huge amount of stuff that browser adblockers miss) despite never needing any fiddling. It's been great for me.
by zibblyteam | 2025-12-08 02:18:22+00:00
Hey HN — we’re building something we wish existed years ago.

Zibbly is our attempt to fix a surprisingly broken space: helping dog parents actually care for their pets in a modern, trustworthy, delightful way. We’re talking daily guidance, early-warning health signals, personalized routines, and a real understanding of your dog — not another generic checklist app.

People are already using Zibbly and the stories have been wild: • parents catching early health issues they would’ve missed • anxious first-time dog owners finally feeling confident • rescue dogs thriving with accurate reminders • vets telling users, “Whatever you’re using, keep doing it.”

But here’s the honest part: to bring this vision to life at the scale dogs deserve, we need more users. Not vanity metrics — real traction that shows investors the world actually wants this.

So I’m turning to the HN community:

If you love dogs… If you believe pets deserve better… If you think technology should actually make care easier and more humane… Would you try Zibbly and tell us what’s broken, what’s magical, and what’s missing?

We’re building Zibbly because dogs can’t speak for themselves but their humans can. And the more of you who try it, the more we can build the product dogs truly deserve.

Ask me anything. Roast the idea. Challenge the assumptions. Tell us what you would want from the go-to pet care app. We’re here, and we’re listening.
by naikrovek | 2025-12-08 02:18:37+00:00
async/await is confusing in every language it is implemented in. Whoever came up with this paradigm has (or at the time, had) zero idea about usability. It is the programming equivalent of the programmer user interface. Makes perfect sense to the one person because they wrote it; it’s an enormous pain for everyone else.

Raw threads and doing everything manually makes far more sense to me.

And of course Goroutines in Go make the most sense but they’re not as performant as something like Zig by any means.
I hacked together a modeler for the 2026 AMT tax cliff (TCJA Sunset)
by optionspilot | 2025-12-08 02:18:43+00:00
Context: The TCJA sunset in 2026 doubles the AMT phase-out rate to 50%, creating a "dead zone" for ISO exercises that most calculators (Carta/Secfi) aren't highlighting yet.

I built a specific modeler for this over the weekend: https://optionpilot.co

Note: The backend logic is working, but I'm still refining the frontend graphs. For today, I'm running the numbers manually for anyone who fills out the form.

I want to verify the 'State Tax' edge cases (especially NY/CA) by hand before I let the automated UI loose next week.

Curious if others are seeing the same break-even shifts for 2026?
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-08 02:18:44+00:00
You'd have better success getting people to fight for your cause when you provide them something of value they can't get elsewhere.

When what people get (using their labor to subsidize politicians & boomers via taxes & rent) is the same thing they can get in effectively any country or even under the invader's rule, the incentives to fight said invader become quite scarce.

This isn't even specific to Germany; a lot of people are fleeing conscription on both sides of the current conflict for the same reason - they just don't get enough benefit to make it worth putting their life on the line.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-08 02:18:58+00:00
Saudi Arabia and the US are bound by oil but Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally beyond that. The relationship with Europe is very different and a much deeper alliance and cultural alignment (the Western world).

Europe is falling behind economically. I certainly don't think that the US see them as a threat in that regards. It's more than European integration creates a single, more powerful bloc that can challenge the US.
by martin-t | 2025-12-08 02:20:10+00:00
> shows intent to obfuscate the origins

Good point. Reminds me of how if you poison one person, you go to prison, but when a company poisons thousands, it gets a fine... sometimes.

> it takes away the one payment that free software authors get: recognition

I keep flip-flopping on this. I did most of my open source work not caring about recognition but about the principles of GPL and later AGPL. However, I came to realize it was a mistake - people don't judge you by the work you actually do but by the work you appear to do. I have zero respect for people who do something just for the approval of others but I am aware of the necessity of making sure people know your value.

One thing is certain: credit/recognition affect all open source code, user rights (e.g. to inspect and modify) affect only the subset under (A)GPL.

Both are bad in their own right.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 02:20:34+00:00
> if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from?

“During the last 10 years PE on average did not outperform the public markets in aggregate” [1]. (Individual firms overperform, some of them consistently.)

> even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees

Yup! Though nitpick: we often stop calling it PE when it works. VC is PE. So are Berkshire Hathaway and founder-led “take private” transactions.

> transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society

PE is often an exit vehicle for small builders. Particularly in the space that deals with SBA loans.

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-066_cc5a53f4-...
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-08 02:20:35+00:00
If you're giving 5:1 against Ive I'll take that in a heartbeat. He has zero historical record to show he can somehow capitalize on AI; even his design contributions are overall meh. Apple will have to do "something" but the beauty of mountains of cash and a business that doesn't need AI everywhere is that they can wait and see what something is, and then execute. They've actually been really good at figuring out implementation after the conceptual heavy lifting is done; it's deep in their DNA
by alexandre_m | 2025-12-08 02:21:50+00:00
The key is always feedback loop. If you give the AI the ability to verify itself, then it's able to iterate faster. Sure, it may take many iterations, but at least the iteration spans will be shorter than waiting for a human to validate each time.

I'd be curious to see how Antigravity compares for the same task with its automatic browser agentic validation logic.
by Saris | 2025-12-08 02:22:49+00:00
The Git Sync or PuppyGit apps are a good way to keep markdown files in sync between devices. I use git for my Obsidian notes.

It's better than file sync because you have diff and merge in case you accidentally edit the same file on 2 devices and get a conflict. Plus you have full history of everything.

If you do need file sync I really like the FolderSync app on my phone, it's reliable and connects using a ton of protocols.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-08 02:23:12+00:00
The main draw of these devices does appear to be telecomm; the Pew article is from 2018, so the numbers have probably changed by now, but back then the majority of users were using dumbphones. I can remember watching videos as early as 2014 showing nomadic tribesmen in Africa using flip phones for mobile payments.

I was under the impression that these devices were Wi-Fi enabled; I take your point that penetration rates for broadband were nowhere near as high back then, but I still think a lot of the criticisms were misplaced. The penetration of telecomm into these countries is going to have massive upside in the next two decades, and computer literacy plays a part in that. I suspect there are compounding network effects involved here that don’t really exist for linear problems like healthcare (though I could just be underestimating the immediate benefit of $1 in medicine vs. $1 in digital literacy).
Show HN: ICT Info-Consciousness-Time First experiment to detect consciousness
by DmitriiBaturoIC | 2025-12-08 02:23:28+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’d like to share something unusual but fully formalized and experimentally grounded.

Together with an AI-coauthor (Elion), we have developed the ICT-model (Information-Consciousness-Time) — a theoretical and experimental framework proposing that:

Consciousness is the rate of informational change → C ∝ dI/dT

Matter is stabilized information → M = I_fixed

Time is not duration, but the structuring of informational transitions

This leads to testable predictions — not metaphors.

For the past months we worked on designing the world’s first experimental protocols aimed at directly detecting and quantifying conscious presence, independent of behavior, language, EEG interpretation bias, or self-reporting.

Some of the measurable variables include:

informational stabilization gradients

local rate of information-state drift

edge detection where I_fixed transitions into dI/dT dominance

This resulted in protocols that can be implemented with existing scientific hardware without inventing new instruments.

What’s currently available publicly:

conceptual model (physics + phenomenology) formal definitions of I_fixed and transitions experimental protocols preliminary data feasibility map

What we are opening now:

a research-open protocol set reproducible pipeline hypothesis-based measurable predictions reference implementation specs

This is not a philosophical paper — it is structured like a scientific toolkit.

If anyone is involved in:

theoretical physics

time studies

information theory

consciousness research

neuroscience instrumentation

complex systems modeling

your feedback would be very valuable.

Link to the full conceptual document and protocol reference:

Preprint (equations, criteria): https://www.academia.edu/s/8924eff666

Main publication (open access): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17584783

PDF: https://www.academia.edu/144946662

Happy to answer questions, criticism, and requests for more detail. The goal is not persuasion, but reproducibility.

Dmitrii Baturo
by fat_cantor | 2025-12-08 02:24:06+00:00
I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.
by toast0 | 2025-12-08 02:24:29+00:00
Bonkers fraud checks that flagged my ISP charges every month for several months in a row. And some other stuff I don't remember, but I'll continue to hold the grudge anyway because there's 9 other top 10 national banks. Or at least 8, cause I'm not using Wells Fargo either (they dinged me a phone teller fee when I called in to let them know I was fixing an overdraft) ... Wells Fargo doesn't do a lot of attractive credit card offers though, so that's less of a hardship than ignoring Chase.
by alexcdot | 2025-12-08 02:25:31+00:00
Absolutely, expectations and tools given by management are a real problem.

If management fires you because they are wrong about how good AI is, and you're right - at the end of the day, you're fired and the manager is in lalaland.

People need to actually push the correct calibration of what these tools should be trusted to do, while also trying to work with what they have.
by andai | 2025-12-08 02:26:20+00:00
Well, she's describing the system's behavior.

My fridge happily reads inputs without consciousness, has goals and takes decisions without "thinking", and consistently takes action to achieve those goals. (And it's not even a smart fridge! It's the one with a copper coil or whatever.)

I guess the cybernetic language might be less triggering here (talking about systems and measurements and control) but it's basically the same underlying principles. One is just "human flavored" and I therefore more prone to invite unhelpful lines of thinking?

Except that the "fridge" in this case is specifically and explicitly designed to emulate human behavior so... you would indeed expect to find structures corresponding to the patterns it's been designed to simulate.

Wondering if it's internalized any other human-like tendencies — having been explicitly trained to simulate the mechanisms that produced all human text — doesn't seem too unreasonable to me.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-08 02:26:34+00:00
The article links to iSponsorBlockTV: https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

This doesn't change the UI as such, but it auto-mutes ads, and auto-skips once the skip option is available. It's a bit of a funny thing to setup, but it works great once setup.
by esperent | 2025-12-08 02:26:43+00:00
The idea is that the more pressure you use, the more unwanted materials like fines and oils will get though the paper. So if you press slowly and stop when you hear a hiss, you should have a better brew.

It does make sense, if imagine pressing through in 5 seconds vs 30 seconds, that the paper filtration would work better in the slower press. But I'm not sure if anyone has scientifically measured this.

Actually wait, it's coffee. Someone has definitely scientifically measured it and probably published a two hour YouTube video with their results.
by blandflakes | 2025-12-08 02:28:36+00:00
I always find downvoting on stuff like this perplexing. It still isn't there. I know that a lot of Scala people are doing metals and some kind of text editor experience, but if you've used something as powerful as Intellij, the Scala 3 experience is a serious downgrade, and it still is today, even though it's better than it was a year ago.
by themafia | 2025-12-08 02:28:49+00:00
> because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp

How often do pay increases perfectly keep someone in the gap? Presumably some of them will be large enough, through changes of jobs for example, that the family would completely jump that gap.

> because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp

Why would it? This is perhaps intentional as well. Only allow the program to benefit half the country. I'm sure you can predict how that political split occurs and insulates politicians from the ballot box.

> It serves to have an underclass that politicians can dump on, it seems.

It helps keeps wages suppressed. Politicians want money. They don't care about "dumping" on you, they'll make any excuse they need to keep the money coming in.
by cal_dent | 2025-12-08 02:28:51+00:00
I remember watching a doco series about moon landing a long time ago; and for the life of me I can't remember what its called. But essentially amongst the awe of the whole thing, it also had the perspective from black americans which i can glibly summarise as "so what? i've got nowhere to live and everything cost to much for me. who gives a crap about what all of that". The same thing applies to a much higher % of Americans now is my guess
by nephihaha | 2025-12-08 02:29:27+00:00
There was this notion of psychiatry promoting conformity back in the 1960s, and while that has diminished, I detect conformist tendencies in this writer. Stuff like social isolation and magical thinking can be the result of cultural forces. (In some parts of the world, magical thinking is still the norm.) Urban environments can also be antisocial for a number of reasons despite high population density.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-12-08 02:31:42+00:00
People on tracks and suicide by train are, I suspect, way more common in London for us than elsewhere. I can't get solid figures though. But it seems to sit around 15k hrs of delays nationwide for people on tracks.

We had a big government inquest into suicide in 2018 which included asking national rail to justify it position and actions. Of the 30k rail bridges in the UK only the hotspots have any modern measures of suicide prevention; and the hotspots are mostly but not exclusively suspension bridges.

However, from your comment, I see that you might be meaning pedestrian bridges across tracks, which almost always have metal rails higher than an adult man here. Our older stone road bridges (which are very common) have thick and tall walls on the edge which serve a similar function if not as effectively.

However, I think to hark back to the original image and post - the bridge depicted is a train bridge going over a road. More like a viaduct tbh. Its highly unlikely that there is any normalised pedestrian access so it won't tank highly for assigning prevention and detection measures for either suicid, and its easily assessed from the busy public road so I doubt it makes the priority list for automated collapse detection.
by Aperocky | 2025-12-08 02:31:59+00:00
There are too much of both fear and optimism in what's is essentially a better compiler and google.

Eventually we will gravitate back to square one, and business people are not going to be writing COBOL or VISUAL BASIC or the long list of eventual languages (yes this now include natural ones, like English) that claim to be so easy that a manager would write it. And Googling/Prompting remain a skill that surprisingly few has truly mastered.

Of course all the venture capital believe that soon we'll be at AGI, but like the internet bubble of 2001 we can awkwardly stay at this stage for quite a long time.
by bluetomcat | 2025-12-08 02:32:04+00:00
It starts from the identifier. At every stage, it outputs a sub-expression which is the “mirrored use” and corresponds to the boxed representation below it. When it reaches the top of the expression, it prints the final type of the expression which is the lone specifier-qualifier list.

As per the screenshot, “arr” is an array of 4 elements. Consequently, “arr[0]” is an array of 8 elements. Then, “arr[0][0]” is a pointer. And so on, until we arrive at the specifier-qualifier list.