MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-13 13:58:07+00:00
Many A-listers are polymaths. For example, Phil Hartman, used to be Phil Hartmann (extra "n"), and designed some of the most iconic album covers of the 1970s, and Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there. It used to be part of his standup bit.

Dick Van Dyke came from the tail end of Vaudeville, where performers had to have a whole variety of skills.

Remember: Every one of these folks that hits the limelight, beat out thousands of others.

We think our vocation is competitive? Showbiz says "Hold my beer."
by acdha | 2025-12-13 13:58:10+00:00
Yes, that’s basically the point: what are termed hallucinations with LLMs are different than what we see in humans – even the confabulations which people with severe mental disorders exhibit tend to have some kind of underlying order or structure to them. People detect inconsistencies in their own behavior and that of others, which is why even that rushed doctor in the original comment won’t suggest something wildly off the way LLMs do routinely - they might make a mistake or have incomplete information but they will suggest things which fit a theory based on their reasoning and understanding, which yields errors at a lower rate and different class.
by Thorrez | 2025-12-13 13:58:43+00:00
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”

>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.

>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.

So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on YouTube.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-13 13:59:04+00:00
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.

Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.

It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
by bondarchuk | 2025-12-13 13:59:11+00:00
It's really a pity for a large part of international train travel too, given Germany's central position in Europe. Many people I know (moi incluis) would really like to take the train for holiday or work travel (instead of airplane) but it's just not worth the risk of having to deal with Deutsche Bahn. Holland to Denmark by train, tried it once, never again.
by concinds | 2025-12-13 13:59:55+00:00
You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.

I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?
by quesera | 2025-12-13 14:00:06+00:00
Kent State was a very different America, a long time ago, and the reaction was immense and swift.

I won't argue that there will not be isolated incidents of horror (too late). I argue that the practice will not take hold and become normalized.

If a new Kent State happens, I depend on Americans to respond immensely and swiftly again. I'd prefer a catalyzing event without loss of life, of course.
by Hnrobert42 | 2025-12-13 14:00:21+00:00
Sometimes I think a lot of myself. Sometimes I don't. During the times I do, I console myself about my lack of success by thinking that I have never been in the right place at the right time.

But had I been in that place at that time, I would not have invented the digital camera. That guy Sasson was clearly capable far beyond the rest of us.
by sschueller | 2025-12-13 14:01:00+00:00
If you lookup the details about the decision to build and construction of Stuttgart 21[1] it's an insane mix of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Partially also a result of laws changing and allowing privatisation of public infrastructure.

This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21

[2] https://youtu.be/V49b13fYFik
by submeta | 2025-12-13 14:01:08+00:00
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.

Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.

Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
by btown | 2025-12-13 14:02:37+00:00
> [The] way to do is to register a tool / function to load and extend the base prompt and presto - you have implemented your own version of skills.

So are they basically just function tool calls whose return value is a constant string? Do we know if that’s how they’re implemented, or is the string inserted into the new input context as something other than a function_call_output?
by colechristensen | 2025-12-13 14:03:05+00:00
About a third of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about exactly this disagreement except about the ability to come to a definition of a specific usage of the word "quality".

Let's put it this way: language written or spoken, art, music, whatever... a primary purpose these things is a sort of serialization protocol to communicate thought states between minds. When I say I struggle to come to a definition I mean I think these tools are inadequate to do it.

I have two assertions:

1) A definition in English isn't possible

2) Concepts can exist even when a particular language cannot express them
by wpietri | 2025-12-13 14:04:07+00:00
I have to keep responding to your posts because you keep grossly mischaracterizing what I'm saying. I have great relationships with my stakeholders. Just this we we delivered something greatly desired by the organization. We are being reliable and professional, just in a way that apparently confuses and frightens you and others. Indeed, I'd claim I'm being more professional that people who give nonsense estimates just because bosses ask for them.
by jstimpfle | 2025-12-13 14:04:19+00:00
Asking for those who, like me, haven't yet taken the time to find technical information on that webpage:

What exactly does that roundtrip latency number measure (especially your 1us)? Does zero copy imply mapping pages between processes? Is there an async kernel component involved (like I would infer from "io_uring") or just two user space processes mapping pages?
by queenkjuul | 2025-12-13 14:04:26+00:00
Arguably, they'll be happier with the video game than with a tank of gas, which you've ensured they'll choose by not giving them the cash

Edit to add: kids often don't have bank accounts, i mostly received gift cards as a child, from relatives who wouldn't want to mail cash and couldn't give me cash in person. On a dark note, giving a kid a gift card to a toy store makes it harder for the parents to steal it for themselves.

The whole practice originates from "gift certificates" where you'd maybe go to your favorite spa and get a gift certificate to give someone, so that the spa treatment is the gift you're giving, but the recipient redeems it whenever they want. That just got abstracted to non-service gifts as well, with the same idea ("treat yourself to a new video game, whichever and whenever you feel like it" -- that's the gift, facilitated by the card)
by frm88 | 2025-12-13 14:04:40+00:00
Onyx has an AI feature in their boox which came very surprisingly with a firmware update a couple of month ago. It does the same thing - however: this needs constant access to the Internet to work and with boox you can switch it off. The article states that on Amazon apps/devices this will be perma-on and I'm sure that will do wonders for your data plan, particularly on phones. /s
by cocoricamo | 2025-12-13 14:04:48+00:00
There are shadow fleets of tankers trafficking oil across the world. Venezuelan oil is sanctioned as well as Iranian so no company without licenses and correct paperwork would touch it unless you move it enough to hide the origin. In the end they all know where it comes from but like the plausible deniability.

Most Venezuelan oil is very heavy and sour and needs to be mixed with lighter oil to be refined and they need access to restricted chemicals for the process. As it was explained to me a few months ago Iran provides lighter oil, solvents and materials for the refining and they take the heavier oil to sell it in the black market.

Sanctions aside the tanker was there for the taking by any government. Spoofing location and flying a false flag are enough to justify boarding and seizure by any country since it's a stateless ship likely involved in illegal activities.

In short yes, USA does it because it can and there's legal justification for it beyond "Trump oil, Trump bad lel", but as usual HN devolves to a potato when world events touch USA politics.
by mhitza | 2025-12-13 14:05:34+00:00
> Tor browser team doesn't want to for simple reason: fingerprinting.

I don't understand this given reason. If they package in uBlock origin across their desktop and android browser. Then everybody will have uBlock origin so the same fingerprint. If the reasons are different subscriptions lists that users might enable/disable, sure that's fingerprintable, just make a disclaimer about that if users want to modify the default lists.
by jccalhoun | 2025-12-13 14:05:51+00:00
This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.
by eigenspace | 2025-12-13 14:06:21+00:00
Indeed, that'd be a more useful metric. Very hard to measure well though and probably actually leaves open more room for them to game the metrics than the current system does.

Keep in mind that for the majority of trains in Germany, nobody bought a specific ticket for that journey. We just use the DeutschlandTicket which is a flat subscription of 58€/month, which gives unlimited access to busses, trams, and regional trains (basically everything but high speed trains).

With the deutschalnd ticket, you typically just walk onto a train of your choice and go wherever you want. They dont actually know where all the travellers are going or even how many people there are
by darrmit | 2025-12-13 14:06:34+00:00
This is horrible and a big reason why I refuse to go “all in” on Apple, Google, or Microsoft (among other reasons). Apple is the one I’m closest to given my hardware, though.

Given how invested you are in the Apple ecosystem I can’t fathom why you would go get an Apple Gift Card from a store to do this kind of transaction, though. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to do it that way.
by jorl17 | 2025-12-13 14:06:45+00:00
I'm so excited for the future, because _clearly_ our technology has loads to improve. Even if new models don't come out, the tooling we build upon them, and the way we use them, is sure to improve.

One particular way I can imagine this is with some sort of "multipass makeshift attention system" built on top of the mechanisms we have today. I think for sure we can store the available skills in one place and look only at the last part of the query, asking the model the question: "Given this small, self-contained bit of the conversation, do you think any of these skills is a prime candidate to be used?" or "Do you need a little bit more context to make that decision?". We then pass along that model's final answer as a suggestion to the actual model creating the answer. There is a delicate balance between "leading the model on" with imperfect information (because we cut the context), and actually "focusing it" on the task at hand, and the skill selection". Well, and, of course, there's the issue of time and cost.

I actually believe we will see several solutions make use of techniques such as this, where some model determines what the "big context" model should be focusing on as part of its larger context (in which it may get lost).

In many ways, this is similar to what modern agents already do. cursor doesn't keep files in the context: it constantly re-reads only the parts it believes are important. But I think it might be useful to keep the files in the context (so we don't make an egregious mistake) at the same time that we also find what parts of the context are more important and re-feed them to the model or highlight them somehow.
by t0mas88 | 2025-12-13 14:06:51+00:00
Is AI energy consumption a stable 24x7 kind of thing? Inference load obviously changes with consumer traffic, so it will have a daily rhythm. But do the large providers use the rest of the capacity for training? Or are those separate clusters?

If it's a stable 24x7 load it would be ideal for nuclear energy, low carbon, but slow to adapt to changes in demand.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-13 14:07:08+00:00
The microwave in my house is built into the oven.

This provides absolutely zero advantages to the oven or to the microwave. It does cause a lot of stupid, easily foreseeable problems:

- There's only one control panel, and if the oven is currently active, some of the microwave controls get disabled.

- The microwave is awful in various ways -- regardless of whether the oven is active -- which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, because microwaves are very cheap. But...

- It's impossible to replace the microwave, a $50 device, without simultaneously replacing the oven, a $2000 device.
by jll29 | 2025-12-13 14:07:50+00:00
It's not just oximeters.

I once worked as a paramedic at the German-French border in the 1990s. Cross-border collaboration between us ("DRK RPF 2/83/1") and the French firefighters ("Samu-67") was cordial but the radio frequencies were not just different but such that the German radios could not even be set to the French frequency (this was before mobile phones were spread beyond C-net phones for business people that looked like suitcases), and syringe tips and infusion needle tips had incompatible endings.

So on one occasion, after running out of medicine and lacking a medic, we called the French colleagues for assistance, and we'd improvise and put a needle on a syringe and injected atropin, adrenaline etc. as needed into the plastic infusion bottle instead of connecting the syringe's ending right to the incompatible butterfly (nick name for the intravenal needle). That episode (Saturday, August 1, 1992) remains particularly memorable since this was my first day on the job, and job #4 on that 24-hour-shift (now they are banned to work that long) would become my first primarily successful resucitation after 45 min of CPR.

Standards (and open borders) can save lives.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-13 14:07:52+00:00
Collective nouns!

They vary between British and American English. In this case, either would acceptable depending on your dialect.

Also very noticeable with sports teams.

American: “Team Spain is going to the final.”

British: “Team Spain are going to the final.”

https://editorsmanual.com/articles/collective-nouns-singular...
by grvbck | 2025-12-13 14:08:08+00:00
For now. I can see a not-so-distant future where internet access is needed for "cloud AI" to enable full 8K resolution, or where Dolby Atmos/Eclipsa Audio/Amphi Hi-D has to be unlocked through an online account, or where "advanced" menu settings like color calibration are tied to a monthly subscription…

Sure, there will probably be some alternatives from independent/smaller manufacturers but they will inevitably be based on older tech and/or standards, come with serious tradeoffs and so on.
by jsax | 2025-12-13 14:08:09+00:00
This is pretty cool.

This functionality is called ‘break back’ in a lot of enterprise modelling software. See [IBM TM1](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-planning/10.2.1?topic=bre...) and [Anaplan](https://help.anaplan.com/breakback-1b7aa87d-aa13-49f6-8f7d-d...). They generally work in terms of scaling the inputs to match the new output though, which is a bit more basic than this approach.
by cube2222 | 2025-12-13 14:08:35+00:00
The general idea is not very new, but the current chat apps have added features that are big enablers.

That is, skills make the most sense when paired with a Python script or cli that the skill uses. Nowadays most of the AI model providers have code execution environments that the models can use.

Previously, you could only use such skills with locally running agent clis.

This is imo the big enabler, which may totally mean that “skills will go big”. And yeah, having implemented multiple MCP servers, I think skills are a way better approach for most use-cases.
by znpy | 2025-12-13 14:10:16+00:00
It may or may not be good, depending on a number of fact.

I did read the original linux zerocopy papers from google for example, and at the time (when using tcp) the juice was worth the squeeze when payload was larger than than 10 kilobytes (or 20? Don’t remember right now and i’m on mobile).

Also a common technique is batching, so you amortise the round-trip time (this used to be the cost of sendmmsg/recvmmsg) over, say, 10 payloads.

So yeah that number alone can mean a lot or it can mean very little.

In my experience people that are doing low latency stuff already built their own thing around msg_zerocopy, io_uring and stuff :)
by simpaticoder | 2025-12-13 14:10:38+00:00
If you tend not to believe something, give greater weight to evidence that it's true. If you tend to believe it, give less weight and actively seek for other explanations. This is how we defeat the confirmation bias in ourselves and have better arguments.

For example, believe climate change is quite real but have a poor intuition for its scale and timeline, which is why I am extra skeptical about the claim that these specific habitat changes are caused by climate change, and wonder what other factors may come into play. (I have the same reaction to climate events - if sloppy thinkers claim heat waves are evidence for climate change, then equally sloppy thinkers on the other side can claim cold snaps are evidence against. Both are wrong, and waste our time.)

Authors should speculate about alternative causal chains even if they eventually discard them. This builds trust. Unfortunately this good behavior is associated with climate change denialism, and so those who admit its reality simply don't offer an alternative even when the complexity of the situation is extremely high. The result, ironically, is just more badvocacy on both sides, more noise in the infospace, which ultimately means the "do nothing" side wins.
by jorl17 | 2025-12-13 14:10:55+00:00
Because the concept of skills is not tied to code development :) Of course if that's what you're talking about, you are already very close to the "interface" that skills are presented in, and they are obvious (and perhaps not so useful)

But think of your dad or grandma using a generic agent, and simply selecting that they want to have certain skills available to it. Don't even think of it as a chat interface. This is just some option that they set in their phone assistant app. Or, rather, it may be that they actually selected "Determine the best skills based on context", and the assistant has "skill packs" which it periodically determines it needs to enable based on key moments in the conversation or latest interactions.

These are all workarounds for the problems of learning, memory...and, ultimately, limited context. But they for sure will be extremely useful.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-13 14:11:21+00:00
The US was founded on crime. We are a colonial imperial country with a penchant for using racism and religion in order to maintain a certain lifestyle for white supremacists.

Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.

This is business as usual.
by hu3 | 2025-12-13 14:12:33+00:00
That's utopia.

While everyone is free to fork and maintain React. It's by no means an easy task, specially if it's not their job like Dan's is.

Plus, industry tends to gravitate towards what is popular. Network effects an all. So if a massively popular tool is subpar, the complications of it aren't without impact.

And no one is immune to criticism. LLMs are criticised for their sycophancy but some humans are no different when it comes to gatekeeping criticism.
by _dain_ | 2025-12-13 14:13:31+00:00
>Auditors obsess over encryption at rest—from laptop FDE to databases’ security theaterish at-rest encryption—and over encryption in transit, usually meaning TLS.

Very hard to parse sentence. The monospace font means the em-dash isnt emmy enough, so I couldn't tell it apart from the hyphen on first, second, and third attempt. I wish people would put spaces around it, and to hell with what the style guide says.
by gpm | 2025-12-13 14:14:10+00:00
If demand stays high existing firms will increase capacity to make more money, and then will compete against eachother on price to sell their new extra capacity. They'll do the same to prevent new firms (in other counties or not) from having an opportunity to come into the market and undercut them.

An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless.

GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-13 14:14:22+00:00
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older.

Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.