MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-08 20:43:16+00:00
> make up required parameters for one to have a valid voting ID in order to have a bunch of fake people issue fake ballots

I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler.

Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web.

I mean sure you _could_ print 20 million IDs/SSN/Drivers license, then pay a few hundreds of thousands of people to go and vote illegally. But thats expensive, take time, and leaves a massive massive paper trail back to you. its much easier to buy access to a dipshit billionaire and get them to force the bullshit down their network.

> Decentralization is empowerment

In some instances yes, but for things that backstop identity, its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)

> it innately builds a freedom of choice, forcing of transparency,

transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-08 20:43:27+00:00
Not flushing on every write is a very common tradeoff of speed over durability. Filesystems, databases, all kinds of systems do this. They have some hacks to prevent it from corrupting the entire dataset, but lost writes are accepted. You can often prevent this by enabling an option or tuning a parameter.

> I wouldn't trust a product that doesn't default to safest options

This would make most products suck, and require a crap-ton of manual fixes and tuning that most people would hate, if they even got the tuning right. You have to actually do some work yourself to make a system behave the way you require.

For example, Postgres' isolation level is weak by default, leading to race conditions. You have to explicitly enable serialization to avoid it, which is a performance penalty. (https://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/11/25/hermitage-testing-th...)
by swatcoder | 2025-12-08 20:43:59+00:00
It's rare than a third-party SaaS can approximate one of these "core sheets" and most of the exceptions have already been explored over the last several decades years.

You have to remember that an SaaS, just like shrink-wrap software, reflects someone else's model of of a process or workflow and the model and implementation evolve per the timeline/agenda of its publisher.

For certain parts of certain workflows, where there's a highly normative and robust industry standard, like invoicing or accounting or inventory tracking, that compromise is worthwhile and we've had both shrink-wrap and SaaS products servicing those needs for a very very long time. We see churn in which application is most popular and what it's interface and pricing look like, but the domains being served have mostly been constant (mostly only growing as new business lines/fashions emerge and mature).

Most of the stuff that remains in a "core sheet" could benefit from the attention of a practiced engineer who could make it more reliable and robust, but almost always reflects that the represented business process is somehow peculiar to the organization. As Access and FoxPro and VBA and Zapier and so many tools have done before, LLM coding assistants and software building tools offer some promise in shaking some of these up by letting orgs convert their "core sheets" to "internal applications".

But that's not an opportunity for SaaS entrepreneurs. It's an opportunity for LLM experts to try to come in and pitch private, bespoke software solutions for a better deal than whatever the Access guy had promised 20 years ago. Because of the long-term maintenance challenges that still plague code that's too LLM-colored, I wouldn't want to be that expert pitching that work, but it's an opportunity for some ambitious folks for sure.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-08 20:44:02+00:00
> They had a table of people laughing along with them, until I asked how much money they had in the bank, and whether it equaled even one one-thousandth of Musk's net worth. That shut them up pretty fast.

... Eh?

"But the lying fantasist is _rich_" is not really a particularly convincing argument. Have you considered that possibly they shut up to avoid having a protracted argument with one of his tedious fans?
by Izikiel43 | 2025-12-08 20:44:26+00:00
Most likely?

I appreciate how food tastes, and cherries in the winter are expensive and tasteless. Summer cherries are the complete opposite, specially if you live in a state where they produce them locally. In WA they invented their own hybrid cherry, the Rainier, which is also really good but you can only get during a short period of time.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 20:44:30+00:00
"The rise in early-onset cancer incidence does not consistently signal a rise in the occurrence of clinically meaningful cancer. While some of the increase in early-onset cancer is likely clinically meaningful, it appears small and limited to a few cancer sites. Much of the increase appears to reflect increased diagnostic scrutiny and overdiagnosis. Interpreting rising incidence as an epidemic of disease may lead to unnecessary screening and treatment while also diverting attention from other more pressing health threats in young adults" [1].

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
by ronald_petty | 2025-12-08 20:44:48+00:00
Great question, hard to quickly answer.

My .02$. Show you can tackle harder problems. That includes knowing which problems matter. That happens with learning a "domain", versus just learning a tool (e.g. web development) in a domain.

Change is scary, but thats because most aren't willing to change. Part of the "scare" is the fear of lost investment (e.g. pick wrong major or career). I can appreciate that, but with a little flexibility, that investment can be repurposed quicker today that in pre-2022 thanks to AI.

AI is just another tool, treat it like a partner not a replacement. That can also include learning a domain. Ask AI how a given process works, its history, regulations, etc. Go confirm what it says. Have it break it down. We now can learn faster than ever before. Trust but verify.

You are using Cursor, that shows a willingness to try new things. Now try to move faster than before, go deeper into the challenges. That is always going to be valued.
by mturmon | 2025-12-08 20:45:06+00:00
I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section).

It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.

They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.

I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
by kevin061 | 2025-12-08 20:45:07+00:00
The dome is so much more than a dome. It is a whole work of engineering, from the way it was assembled and installed to the internal structure itself.

It is built in two layers. The inner one deflects radiation and heat back into the core, in the middle there is a cooling layer, I believe they even use liquid cooling to ensure the temperature difference between the inner hot and the outer cold layers are not too drastic which could cause thermal expansion and damage. And then there is the outer layer, designed to withstand heavy winds and harsh climate conditions. Just piercing the outer layer would have damaged the coolant middle layer and ruined a large amount of engineering work that went into this structure.

The dome was also literally built in such a way that it was assembled a few meters away and then slid over. There is no real practical way to fix the hole that appeared. There is no sufficiently tall ladder or sufficiently stable helicopter for this work. Especially in the middle of a war.

Putin should be sent to The Hague for just this, but there are many more reasons too.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-08 20:45:25+00:00
The core issue here is one of companies lying about the service and the price. TOS should not be allowed to hide price at time of checkout, which they effectively are doing by allowing selling personal data. So the fix is simple. if they are going to make additional money on you after the service ends and that is considered part of the payment then it should be clearly displayed as part of the cost and NOT allowed in the TOS. This should be required by law. If you are making money off of me and I don't know it it should be a crime. You stole from me.
by throw234678 | 2025-12-08 20:45:37+00:00
1. I haven't commented on HN in a while and didn't want to dig up my password. Throwaway accounts are a tradition.

2. I don't want people to see my disparagement of the quality of prose in this article as indication of personal agreement or disagreement with any of the points in the article. I have no horse in this race. I just want to read high-quality material. I love HN, but I'm not sure how much longer HN will be a place I can frequent in this respect. Have the hills not eroded? What of childlike curiosity?

3. My comment is nothing special. Others also point out portions of this article may be AI generated. People can verify the contents of my comment independently and come to their own conclusions. It does not require that I lean on implied authority of some form.

I read a lot, it's basically all I do. I wish writers maintained the contract of spending at least as much energy writing out ideas as they expect their audience to expend while reading them.

I will now log out of this account and lose the password. I hope this was helpful. I intend no malice; I'm sure the author of this piece is a kind person and fun to hang out with. I hope they take this feedback the right way.
by plasticeagle | 2025-12-08 20:45:51+00:00
I have had conversations at work, with people who I have reason to believe are smart and critical, in which they made the claim that humans and AI basically learn in the same way. My response to them, as to anyone that makes this claim, is that the amount of data ingested by someone with severe sensory dysfunction of one sort or another is very small. Helen Keller is the obvious extreme example, but even a person who is simply blind is limited to the bandwidth of their hearing.

And yet, nobody would argue that a blind person is any less intelligent that a sighted person. And so the amount of data a human ingests is not correlated with intelligence. Intelligence is something else.

When LLMs were first proposed as useful tools for examining data and proving answers to questions, I wondered to myself how they would solve the problem of there being no a-priori knowledge of truth in the models. How they would find a way of sifting their terabytes of training data so that the models learnt only true things.

Imagine my surprise that not only did they not attempt to do this, but most people did not appear to understand that this was a fundamental and unsolvable problem at the heart of every LLM that exists anywhere. That LLMs, without this knowledge, are just random answer generators. Many, many years ago I wrote a fun little Markov-chain generator I called "Talkback", that you could feed a short story to and then have a chat with. It enjoyed brief popularity at the University I attended, you could ask it questions and it would sort-of answer. Nobody, least of all myself, imagined that the essential unachievable idea - "feed in enough text and it'll become human" - would actually be a real idea in real people's heads.

This part of your answer though;

"My paper and pen version of the latest LLM .... My paper and pen version of the latest LLM"

Is just a variation of the Chinese Room argument, and I don't think it holds water by itself. It's not that it's just an algorithm, it's that learning anything usefully correct from the entire corpus of human literary output by itself is fundamentally impossible.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-08 20:46:04+00:00
Oh, I agree that alternatives can cost more money, but they are still there.

Roads go out or are down for maintenance. People use alternate routes. Happens all the time.

And yes, the last time the power went out at my house I connected to the internet via cell phone. Google says that Starlink provides internet access.

P.S. I also have a generator, as do my neighbors, because the power grid here is unreliable. Alternatives exist.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-08 20:46:30+00:00
Human time is certainly valuable to a particular human. However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine.

I think it's worth remembering that IP law is generally viewed (at least legally) as existing for the net benefit of society as opposed to for ethical reasons. Certainly many authors feel like they have (or ought to have) some moral right to control their work but I don't believe that was ever the foundation of IP law.

Nor do I think it should be! If we are to restrict people's actions (ex copying) then it should be for a clear and articulable net societal benefit. The value proposition of IP law is that it prevents degenerate behavior that would otherwise stifle innovation. My question is thus, how do these AI developments fit into that?

So I completely agree that (for example) laundering a full work more or less verbatim through an AI should not be permissible. But when it comes to the higher order transformations and remixes that resemble genuine human work I'm no longer certain. I definitely don't think that "human exceptionalism" makes for a good basis either legally or ethically.

Regarding FOSS licenses, I'm again asking how AI relates back to the original motivations. Why does FOSS exist in the first place? What is it trying to accomplish? A couple ideological motivations that come to mind are preventing someone building on top and then profiting, or ensuring user freedom and ability to tinker.

Yes, the current crop of AI tools seem to pose an ideological issue. However! That's only because the current iteration can't truly innovate and also (as you note) the process still requires lots of painstaking human input. That's a far cry from the hypothetical that I previously posed.
by j45 | 2025-12-08 20:46:36+00:00
Samsung for the longest time was releasing updates way too late, and what they were releasing monthly was old patches.

Buying a device directly from Samsung may be different, but the manufacturer still has to usually convert the pure android update to their branch.

Still, trying to find a pure android phone is important. More manufacturers used to make them.

Example: https://www.androidauthority.com/best-smartphones-stock-andr...
by cultofmetatron | 2025-12-08 20:47:03+00:00
I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.

I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.

How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.

I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.

This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
by docjay | 2025-12-08 20:47:04+00:00
Ahh. EPYC doesn't use DMI, so there’s an easy elimination, and they have enough PCIe lanes so that switches only come up with boards supporting oodles of drives. It’s still worth checking your mobo manual to make sure there isn’t a specific mention of port selection related to PCIe switches, or a silly bios option.

There might be some confusion that’s holding you back on diagnostics though. If a PCIe switch was in the path and causing the issue then there’s no meaningful difference between “parallel” and “bidirectional.” The nature of the switch is that all the traffic goes through it and it has a top speed and that’s split among the operations. Read or write to a single drive gets full bandwidth, but copying from one to another is read and write, so each part gets 50%. Even on the same drive, write/read and write/read also get 50% each. Include other drives on the same switch and divide it again. “And” = divide.

Your platform makes that specific issue less likely, but hardware can be a bit more quirky than you might be giving it credit.

Of course you’ve turned off windows defender real-time scanning, but otherwise I can’t think of an on-by-default reason for Windows Server to cause that issue, but it isn’t inherent in the OS. I’ve used multiple versions in dozen GB/s arrangements - 1.5GB/s was beatable 20 years ago. There’s something going on with your settings or hardware. Good news is it might be fixable, bad news is you’ll have to go trekking around to find the issue. :/
by Ukv | 2025-12-08 20:47:07+00:00
The index_tiled.html version correctly positions the original assets, and to me looks as close as you can get to the screenshot while using the original assets (except for the red text).

The version with the screenshot as a background is where it was asked to create an exact match for screenshot that had been scaled/compressed, which isn't really possible any other way. The article acknowledges this one as cheating.

Better I think would've been to retake the screenshot without the scaling/compression, to see if it can create a site that is both an exact match and using the original assets.
by umeedsto | 2025-12-08 20:47:19+00:00
MathGPT.today AI Math Explanations, Step-by-Step Videos, Flashcards, and a New Kids Mode

Hi everyone, I built MathGPT.today. I built it because I went through years of math classes where everything moved too fast. You sit in a lecture hall with 300 people, the prof runs through one easy example, and then the homework is ten levels harder. By the time you’ve formed your question, class is already over.

MathGPT.today came out of that frustration. I wanted a tool that slows down, shows every step, and lets you ask “why?” without feeling embarrassed or rushed.

Today the platform can break down problems step by step, generate short AI videos that explain concepts visually, and build automatic flashcards from your solutions so you can actually review and remember what you learned.

I recently added MathGPT Kids for grades 1–8 a more visual, friendly mode with simpler language, emojis, and guided steps. A lot of younger students are finding us now, so this felt important.

I’m also experimenting with game-style learning: mini-quests, badges, and practice streaks that make math feel less intimidating and more like progress you can see.

The goal isn’t to just hand out answers. It’s to help students genuinely understand why each step works and build real confidence whether it’s late at night before a quiz or during a tough homework session.

Would love feedback or thoughts from the HN community.

https://mathgpt.today/
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-08 20:47:44+00:00
The most enviable part of Star Trek isn't warp speed or teleporters; it's the complete lack of advertisements shown to the characters.

Moreover, there isn't a technological barrier to an ad-free life like the other technologies. We just haven't the collective social will to make it happen. In some sad way it feels even more impossible than FTL.
by next_xibalba | 2025-12-08 20:47:45+00:00
> Net Income and Operating Cash Flow are not the same thing

This is the second article that gained a lot of traction on HN in the last few months with similar fundamental errors. The previous one was similarly written by someone with a dev background where they didn't understand the difference between gross margins, operating profit, and net income–concepts which were the basis for their analysis.

I wonder with this author or the previous, if they're just a little too confident in their abilities. Accounting and Finance are very deep and highly technical fields. Particularly for publicly traded companies where the businesses tend to be very complex and sophisticated and the consequences for making mistakes or committing fraud are severe. I'm not suggesting that non-finance people shouldn't try to analyze this stuff, but some humility might be in order.

It reminds me of a data scientist I worked with who was doing some modeling on companies' revenues. He believed he'd uncovered some secret, conspiratorial truth about Samsung having trillions in revenues, thereby making it the largest and most powerful entity on Earth. We had to gently inform him that he was looking at the revenues denominated in Korean Won and they needed to be converted to USD.
by johnea | 2025-12-08 20:47:58+00:00
To try to dispel the myth of a "coop" being defined as four old hippies sorting groceries in the back room of their run down victorian house in Portland:

The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Often touted as "the worlds largest coop".

Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-08 20:48:46+00:00
As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable.

The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.

Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).