MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by directevolve | 2025-12-27 20:37:04+00:00
Well, CRISPR-Cas9 as a tool for genetic engineering was only invented in 2012. A 13-year translation timeline is not unusual, maybe even unusually fast. CAR-T cell therapy for cancer took 30 years from discovery to clinic. It took about 30 years to go from the early attempts to use engineered lipid nano particles for drug delivery to the first FDA-approved medication using them, doxil.

With CRISPR, it took a long time to figure out how to reliably edit just the gene you want and acceptably minimize off-target edits, including by delivering the therapeutic to just the organ affected and getting the dose and release right.

The public is understandably leery about experimental medical techniques. If they had killed this newborn child with CRISPR therapy, then it might have set created a backlash delaying translation of this technique for years, possibly decades.

In biomedicine, we’re always looking for therapies that approximate the level of precision control available in software. Unfortunately, it’s never more than an approximation, and our ability to measure and predict the size of that error is always limited. That is why the field moves slowly.
by silotis | 2025-12-27 20:37:06+00:00
"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).

Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.

So no, roads are not a public good.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-27 20:37:08+00:00
> I'd expect this to run circles around an N150 for single-threaded perf too

It has basically the same single-core performance as an N150 box

Random N150 result: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10992465

> BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread?

At this point I expect a lot of people have been enticed by niche SBCs and then discovered that driver support is a nightmare, as this article shows. So in time, everyone discovers that cheap x86-64 boxes accomplish their generic computing goals easier than these niche SBCs, even if the multi-core performance isn't the same.

Being able to install a mainline OS and common drivers and just get to work is valuable.
by grensley | 2025-12-27 20:38:06+00:00
A la carte in AI is going to be the name of the game for a couple reasons:

- Avoids regulatory scrutiny (for now at least)

- Nobody is actually entrenched enough for customers to matter

- Weird "celebrity" culture in tech, and AI especially. Everyone is looking for a "whisperer" or a "godfather" or whatever.

- Investors still get paid out

Smart operational talent will probably adapt by demanding higher salary, signing bonuses, severance packages in lieu of equity. Distribution of the true "lottery tickets" will get more uneven.
by skhameneh | 2025-12-27 20:38:07+00:00
I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself.
Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.

And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.

Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work.
For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.
by achyudh | 2025-12-27 20:38:17+00:00
I was more familiar with Vim bindings and relied on Vim emulation layers in various IDEs before I moved to Emacs. Evil mode and Doom made the jump possible without sacrificing too much productivity. With Evil, I didn't have to retrain my muscle memory and with Doom I didn't have to cobble together a functional config from scratch.

After a couple of months of using Doom, I felt comfortable enough to roll my own config which also helped me better understand how things worked at a lower level. More interestingly, after a couple of years, I transitioned from Evil to standard Emacs bindings as that felt better integrated with the rest of Emacs.
by analogpixel | 2025-12-27 20:38:39+00:00
I've been thinking about this recently, but more that the gameboy used to have a unique screen size that no one else had, but then with the switch they decided to adopt the same screen dimensions as everyone else allowing them to play the same games the rest of the platforms could. At this point, there is really no difference between a steam deck, switch, ps5 or xbox. They can all play the same games at the same output dimensions.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-12-27 20:39:51+00:00
I agree, in a job where you have no documentation and no CI, and are working on something almost as old or older than you with ancient abandoned tools like svn that stopped being relevant 20 years ago, and in a fundamentally dysfunctional company/organization that hasn't bothered to move off of dead/dying tools in the last 20 years, then you just desperately grab at anything you can possibly find to try to avoid breaking things. But there are far better solutions to all of the problems you are mentioning than trying to make people create little mini feature commits on their way to a feature.
Do you know what your dev team shipped last week?
by akhnid | 2025-12-27 20:39:57+00:00
Built a tool for founders and eng managers who want visibility without checking GitHub every day. It connects to your repos, tracks commits and PRs automatically, and sends weekly summaries to Slack or email. Also works as a Slack bot - ask it "what shipped last week" or "what's stuck in review" right from your workspace. https://gitmore.io (free for 1 repo) Would this actually save you time?
by dang | 2025-12-27 20:40:07+00:00
This is the sort of thing I was referring to:

> Instead of bothering to read and understand you have continued to call names.

> You seemed confused, you still seem confused

> your pointless semantic nitpick

> you need to get some more real world experience

I wouldn't personally call that being polite, but whatever we call it, it's certainly against HN's rules, and that's what matters.

Edit: This may or may not be helpful (probably not!) but I wonder if you might be experiencing the "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" phenomenon that shows up pretty often on the internet - that is, we tend to underestimate the provocation in our own comments, and overestimate the provocation in others' comments, which in the end produces quite a skew (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
by forrestthewoods | 2025-12-27 20:40:34+00:00
Timesync isn’t a nightmare at all. But it is a deep rabbit hole.

The best approach, imho, is to abandon the concept of a global time. All timestamps are wrt a specific clock. That clock will skew at a rate that varies with time. You can, hopefully, rely on any particular clock being monotonous!

My mental model is that you form a connected graph of clocks and this allows you to convert arbitrary timestamps from any clock to any clock. This is a lossy conversion that has jitter and can change with time. The fewer stops the better.

I kinda don’t like PTP. Too complicated and requires specialized hardware.

This article only touches on one class of timesync. An entirely separate class is timesync within a device. Your phone is a highly distributed compute system with many chips each of which has their own independent clock source. It’s a pain in the ass.

You also have local timesync across devices such as wearables or robotics. Connecting to a PTP system with GPS and atomic clocks is not ideal (or necessary).

TicSync is cool and useful. https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/icra.2011.5980112
by bdangubic | 2025-12-27 20:41:20+00:00
> biden and his government was not corrupt in any meaningful sense

amazing to read this, very amazing. the echochambers people live in these days are mind-boggling. biden has been a politician for 5+ decades and you do not get to be that unless you are evil and corrupted and bought ecery fiber of your being… must be all kinds of nice living in a fantasy world you live in. trump surely will top any evil and corruption (at least in america, no contest) but saying biden is not corrupt is beyond any comprehension :) wow, just woow
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-27 20:41:24+00:00
That’s actually not at all what TrueTime guarantees and assuming they’ve solved a physical impossibility is dangerous technically as a founding assumption for higher level tech (which thankfully Spanner does not do).

What TrueTime says is that clocks are synchronized within some delta just like NTP, but that delta is significantly smaller thanks to GPS time sync. That enables applications to have tighter bounds on waiting to see if a conflict may exist before committing which is why Spanner is fast. CockroachDB works similarly but given the logistical challenge of getting GPS receivers into data centers, they worked to achieve a smaller delta through better NTP-like timestamps and generally get fairly close performance.

https://programmingappliedai.substack.com/p/what-is-true-tim...

> Bounded Uncertainty: TrueTime provides a time interval, [earliest, latest], rather than a single timestamp. This interval represents the possible range of the current time with bounded uncertainty. The uncertainty is caused by clock drift, synchronization delays, and other factors in distributed systems.
by abdulbasitali | 2025-12-27 20:42:13+00:00
That is exactly why we enforce a hard budget cap (default is $1.00).

The system runs a pre-flight check before every LLM call. If you're about to go over budget, it kills the process immediately (SentinelBudgetExceeded).

We don't have a specific "max retries" counter wired up yet, but I'll likely add that soon based on your feedback. For now, the budget cap would have caught it at $1.
by guntis_dev | 2025-12-27 20:42:36+00:00
Not exactly a bug, but I was given a company written video player that receives a video stream, decodes it via the browser WebCodecs API, and renders via WebGL. Users complained that video was laggy and often froze on their iPhones. My task was to make it perform better - using the browser's built-in player wasn't an option.

After profiling, I found two bottlenecks: converting frames to RGB was happening on the CPU and was quite costly, so I rendered the decoded YUV frames directly on the GPU without conversion. Second, I moved all logic off the main thread since our heavy UI was competing for the same resources.

The main thread thing was that I was iterating through the frame buffer multiple times per second to select the appropriate frame for rendering. When heavy UI animations occurred, the main thread would block, causing the iteration to complete late - by then, the target frame's timestamp had passed, so it would get skipped and only the next frame would be drawn, creating visible stuttering.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-27 20:42:41+00:00
On the contrary, it seems to me that it is your approach which is incompatible with others. I'm not the same person you were replying to but I want the history of a branch to be coherent, not a hot mess of meaningless commits. I do my best to maintain my branches such that they can be merged without squashing, that way it reflects the actual history of how the code was written.
by aarondf | 2025-12-27 20:42:59+00:00
Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win.

That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, talk about them, and get cool jobs or friends or a following or whatever. I understand not everyone is comfortable with this tradeoff.
by tacone | 2025-12-27 20:43:11+00:00
Interesting, I was trying to implement this using AGENTS.md and the runSubagent tool in vscode. Vscode has not yet the capability to invoke different models as subagent so I plan to fallback to instructing copilot to use copilot-cli and gemini-cli. (I am quite angry about copilot CLI offering only full blown models and not the -mini versions though)
by tharkun__ | 2025-12-27 20:43:51+00:00
My branch is mine. Don't tell me what I can or can't do. I push WIP stuff all the time, to share code with others for discussion, to get the build to run in parallel while I keep working or just at the end of the day. I freely amend and will squashed before merging (we only allow a single commit per branch to go to master).

If I or someone else bases something off anything but master that's on them to rebased and keep up to date.
by dyukqu | 2025-12-27 20:44:43+00:00
Looked up for "jeeves and wooster", so, you're British then. This makes this little conversation interesting for me, because I'm not American, not even European and so our exposure/approach to this novel is very different then, I guess. Even the language was a little over my head, since English is not my native tongue. However, I really enjoyed it. I liked Heller's style (prose?) and wit.
About Yossarian...yes, he's not a "perfect hero", but he is very human with all his earthly desires (I would say) and his struggles for staying righteous at the same time.
The chapter about thoughts crossed his mind & feelings he experienced while he was wandering in the cold, damp streets at night was peak for me. I might re-read that very chapter nowadays.
by throw0101c | 2025-12-27 20:45:00+00:00
> What could replace it?

It doesn't necessarily have to be one thing. We've had multi-currency regimes in the past (before one generally took over). See How global currencies work past, present, and future by Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu:

* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177007/ho...
by zzzeek | 2025-12-27 20:45:08+00:00
sure here's a command that a program I wrote to record my practicing and produce different mixes uses

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -i "/path/to/musicfile.mp3" -i "/path/to/covertune.mp3" \
-filter_complex [1:a]volume=1[track1];[0a][track1]amix=normalize=false[output] \
-map [output] -b:a 192k -metadata title=15:17:01 -metadata "artist=Me, 2025" \
-metadata album=2025-12-23 "/path/to/file.mix.mp3"

chance of my coming up with that without deep poring over docs and tons of trial and error, or using claude (which is pretty much what I do nowadays): zero
by esoterae | 2025-12-27 20:45:29+00:00
What a remarkable stalking horse to try and kneecap right-to-repair by arguing "Please, think of the chil^H^H^H^Hhackers!"

You wouldn't download a CAR, would you? You wouldn't hack your own INSULIN pump, would you?

Face it: If it's GPL and vulnerable to interference, responsibility is squarely on the manufacturer and the fastest death-free way to prove it. If it's GPL and modified by the owner, fuck off.
by uplifter | 2025-12-27 20:46:23+00:00
Its conceivable that the universe could encode a goal somehow, after all its so vast, but that conceivability alone is not evidence for the existence of an encoded goal any more than the conceivability of extra-terrestrial intelligence, or of a higher design to reality, is proof of their existence. What science tells us is that the only goal nature seems to embody is following the physical laws we've been able to determine, and nothing more. I'd apply the same interesting hypothesis status to huge-time-scale teleology that we cannot discern, and perhaps it is both real and we will never be able to discern it. Personally I find the notions very interesting, but I don't see reason to believe in them. If there were good evidence for them, they'd be the subject of scientific study already.

But we seem to agree that natural selection doesn't have a goal. In my observation, any purported overarching goal that is ascribed to natural selection, including the measure of inclusive fitness[0], can be reduced to some function of the context in which it is being observed, like moth coloration was influenced by soot levels.

As to my main claim, I do believe it is necessary that an encoding of a goal is necessary for choice among actions in pursuit of a goal, because some kind of reference to a goal is necessary to compare options in a decision algorithm. In the case of a-life systems which have goals, that encoding is somewhere in the algorithm of evolution rules combined with the initial state of the simulation. In the case of nature, I don't see a place where that encoding could exist, except the trivial "goal" that all elements will follow the laws of physics.

Please note though that I never put it that "the implementation must embody the goal," I was more careful with my language by saying that it must have an accessible or working encoding of the goal, one its decision process or evolution rule would need to reference in order to make decisions that favored it. The encoding need not be internal (so embody is definitely not necessary), and none of these things are necessarily explicit or well partitioned (e.g. an evolution rule can implicitly encode a goal).

edit: addendum: [0] On inclusive fitness being reducible to situational factors, I'm just following the direction of M.A. Nowak, C.E. Tarnita and E.O. Wilson on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205
by linkage | 2025-12-27 20:46:54+00:00
Generally sound advice, if elementary.

However, making money is not an engineering problem. My previous employer 5x’ed their revenue with a largely feature-complete Rails application by hiring a kick-ass marketing team and actually looking at the usage analytics to tweak small things like form structure, the on-boarding flow, etc. The system design solves problems like scaling performance, avoiding tech debt, scaling headcount (microservices let multiple teams work on the code in parallel), and providing resilience, all of which have business value that is harder to quantify as easily.
by Groxx | 2025-12-27 20:48:09+00:00
Literally the only pre-commit hook I've ever "liked" has been one to look for files over ~1/2MB, and error with a message describing how to bypass the check (env var). It stops the mistake at the easiest-to-identify point, and helped teach a lot of people about how to set gitignore or git-attributes correctly when it is most relevant and understandable. Every single other one has been a massive pain at some point...

... but even that one took several rounds of fiddling and complexifying to get it to behave correctly (e.g. merging commits with already-committed bypassed binaries should be allowed. how do you detect that? did you know to check for that scenario when building the hook? someone's gonna get bitten by it, and there are dozens of these cases).

So yea. Agreed. Do not use pre-commit hooks, they're far more trouble than they seem, and the failure modes / surprises are awful and can be quite hard to figure out to laymen who are experiencing it.

(much of this is true for all git hooks imo)
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-27 20:49:27+00:00
25 cents for me. I can get a sticker for $5 sticker that negates that (no transponder I think for Seattle’s first
520 bridge, maybe for carpools?). Oh, supposedly the sticker is a transponder, so I can save 25 cents if I buy a $5 sticker. Even though I don't use the bridge that often, it makes sense to buy.
by gehsty | 2025-12-27 20:49:35+00:00
To be blunt you do not get it from eating cookies in sand. You get it from ingesting pinworm eggs, you ingest them by someone touching their bum (where the worms lay eggs) and then touching something that you then touch and touch your face/mouth, or scratching your own bum in your sleep then scratching your face / mouth.

If you don’t think it’s super commen in Europe it’s generally a lack of diagnoses. Literally 1/5th
Of British kids have it at any given time (and I imagine that tracks across Europe and USA at least)
by vel0city | 2025-12-27 20:49:41+00:00
> Look at the financial reports yourself

I have for the toll roads I drive on. It shows the debt payments being paid by the toll revenues, not other state taxes.

> In EVERY CASE of a failed toll road the major bond holders have all been made whole through the state directly or indirectly.

Sure, the toll agencies are ultimately a creature of the state but it's incorrect (a lie?) to argue it's funded primarily, originally through tax dollars. What's the rate of these failures? What's the actual percentage of these bonds being paid by toll revenues versus failing and the states being on the hook? Once again you said it's primarily and originally. Being paid because the bond failed to be paid back by toll revenues isn't the original payment plan, and unless it's happening most of the time it's not the primary way of those bonds being paid.

> make something that simply should be public, private

The toll roads I'm talking about are public.

> address this "viewpoint."

This "viewpoint" is otherwise known as "reality".
by cdecker | 2025-12-27 20:49:51+00:00
I wonder if this should be the case. The state consists of it's voters and it's voted representatives. Companies and the economy in general, are secondary entities (unless you really treat them as people, which opens a whole can of worms, see PACs etc), and a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

As such, yes, be pro-economy, but don't forget the people having to live in that society.
by bb88 | 2025-12-27 20:50:07+00:00
Like all "economically sound" ideas, people fuck it up. To the drivers, its one more reminder of a government taxing you on a day to day basis, locking up the roads taxes paid for, for another series of taxes.

Chicago is the poster child here. Constant rate hikes. Diverted funds meant to maintain the roads going elsewhere. "Temporary" tolls that become "permanent", etc.

It's bad, stop the madness.
by 65a | 2025-12-27 20:51:41+00:00
> I certainly want to get rid of gpg from my life if I can

I see this sentiment a lot, but you later hint at the problem. Any "replacement" needs to solve for secure key distribution. Signing isn't hard, you can use a lot of different things other than gpg to sign something with a key securely. If that part of gpg is broken, it's a bug, it can/should be fixed.

The real challenge is distributing the key so someone else can verify the signature, and almost every way to do that is fundamentally flawed, introduces a risk of operational errors or is annoying (web of trust, trust on first use, central authority, in-person, etc). I'm not convinced the right answer here is "invent a new one and the ecosystem around it".
by twosdai | 2025-12-27 20:51:45+00:00
Photonic computing has a lot of practical applications for signal transfer already.

Basically anytime we send a signal across a large fiber optic cable we need to convert signal from light back to electricity and that requires some level of photonic computing. Its used at scale today. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/photonics

However I suspect that you mean photonic computing where a computer on chip device uses photons instead of electrons to communicate. In which case, as far as I know is still research phase.
by wyldfire | 2025-12-27 20:52:10+00:00
I really want to assume you are debating in good faith but you're making it difficult.

This sounds like a flavor of whataboutism - the baseline was bad already so let's please disregard the fact that it's worse now.

Can we at least agree: is corruption bad? If so, then isn't it of note when it becomes more widespread or to a greater severity?