MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-12-21 10:16:09+00:00
You can't drive at 12 though surely? And you have to account for the fact that young people are going to be more likely to die in crashes and more likely to use weed.

This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.

Surely this has been done?
by 0x3f | 2025-12-21 10:16:13+00:00
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating

Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.

> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?

Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.

Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Wish HN: Dark Mode for Xmas (Or 2026)
by rcarmo | 2025-12-21 10:17:24+00:00
I will keep asking for this regularly, but here goes: HN needs a dark mode set with @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark).

Before people point out that there are a bazillion dark mode hacks out there right now (like Noir for the Mac and Dark Reader for Firefox), here's my case for it:

- RSS readers like Reeder Classic and NetNewsWire on iOS (and their Android peers) that have embedded browsers to read articles inline CANNOT USE EXTENSIONS OR PLUGINS to force dark mode

And yes, I read HN almost exclusively via a mobile RSS reader, and every night/morning I get blinding white flashes as I click through to read the comments.

That is it. Feel free to discuss your own reasons for wanting dark mode in the comments (and, of course, post about your workarounds, since everyone has an opinion every time I mention this :))
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-21 10:17:36+00:00
> Did it do what it was supposed to do, but in a different way or defer for retrying later? Then WARN.

> Did it fail to do what it needed to do? ERROR

> Did it do what it needed to do in the normal way because it was totally recoverable? INFO

We have a web-facing system (it uses a custom request-response protocol on top of Websocket... it's an old system) that users are routinely trying to, ahem, automate even though it's technically against ToS but hey, as long as we don't catch them? Anyway, it's quite often to see user connections that send malformed commands and then get disconnected after we send them a critical_error/protocol_error message — we do have quite extensive validation logic for user commands.

So, how should such errors be logged in your opinion? I know that we originally logged them as errors but very quickly changed to warnings, and precisely for the reasons outlined in TFA: if some kewl haxxor can't figure out how to quote strings in JSON, it's not really something we can't fix. We probably should keep the records, just to know that "oh, some script kiddie was trying to hack us during that time period" but nothing more than that; it definitely doesn't warrant the "hey, there are too many errors in sfo2 location, please take a look" summons at 3:00 AM from the ops team.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-12-21 10:18:33+00:00
> The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

This reasoning is invalid. If AI is doing nothing but simply "learning from" like a human, then there is no "stealing from artists" either. A person is allowed to learn from copyright content and create works that draw from that learning. So if the AI is also just learning from things, then it is not stealing from artists.

On the other hand if you claim that it is not just learning but creating derivative works based on the art (thereby "stealing" from them), then you can't say that it is not creating derivative works of the code it ingests either. And many open source licenses do not allow distribution of derivative works without condition.
by kokau | 2025-12-21 10:18:45+00:00
Hi HN

I’ve been building Magiclip, a tool that helps creators and businesses turn long videos (YouTube, podcasts, interviews, gameplay) into short-form viral clips automatically.

The problem

Repurposing content is extremely time-consuming:

Watching hours of footage

Finding the right moments

Adding subtitles, hooks, formats

Reposting everywhere

Most creators know they should do it — but don’t.

What Magiclip does

You upload a video → Magiclip:

Detects engaging moments

Generates short clips

Adds clean subtitles

Optimizes them for TikTok, Reels & Shorts

No editing skills required.

Why I built it

I was doing this manually for my own content and client projects. I wanted a one-click pipeline instead of 2–3 hours per video.

Current state

Early users onboarded

Still iterating heavily

Very open to feedback

https://app.magiclip.io

Would love your thoughts — especially from creators or people automating content workflows.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-12-21 10:18:50+00:00
I'm not a cloud-hosting fan, but comparing RDS to a single instance DB seems crazy to me. Even for a hobby project, I couldn't accept losing data since the last snapshot. If you are going to self-host PostgreSQL in production, make sure you have at least some knowledge how to setup streaming replication and have monitoring in place making sure the replication works. Ideally, use something like Patroni for automatic failover. I'm saying this a someone running fairly large self-hosted HA PostgreSQL databases in production.
by rcarmo | 2025-12-21 10:20:34+00:00
Just updated:

- https://github.com/rcarmo/guerite (A watchtower replacement)

- https://github.com/rcarmo/python-steward (an LLM harness for "agentic" code editing, generated by... its TypeScript variant)

- https://github.com/rcarmo/kata (my micro-PaaS)

- https://github.com/rcarmo/drawterm (my Plan9 drawterm patches for modern macOS)
by Kerollmops | 2025-12-21 10:20:50+00:00
So nice! That's an excellent extract and looks useful for benchmarking Meilisearch. I'll probably spend my Christmas holidays importing the tracks, albums, and artists into Meilisearch, while my CEO builds a beautiful front-end for it. I'll probably replace [the current music search demo](https://music.meilisearch.com) we have with this much higher-quality dataset!

That would also be a good fit for [the new delta-encoded posting lists I am working on](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pull/5985). Let's see how good it can get. My early benchmarks showed a 50% reduction in disk usage.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-21 10:20:51+00:00
In the home computer universe, such computers were the first ones having a programmable graphics unit that did more than paste the framebuffer into the screen.

While the PCs were still displaying text, or if you were lucky to own an Hercules card, gray text, or maybe a CGA one, with 4 colours.

While the Amigas, which I am more confortable with, were doing this in the mid-80's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Px-ZkObTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A

The original Amiga 1000, had on its motherboard, later reduced to fit into an Amiga 500,

Motorola 68000 CPU, a programmable sounds chip with DMA channels (Paula), and a programable blitter chip (Agnus aka early GPUs).

You would build in RAM the audio, or graphics instructions for the respetive chipset, set the DMA parameters, and let them lose.
by hermanzegerman | 2025-12-21 10:20:53+00:00
They don't pay any artist who has less than 1000/Streams per Song per Year.

They also deliberately choose a model which favours big artists, where they split the compensation just by the plays instead of User Centric Payments.

Either way I don't feel bad about the Labels or Spotify.

If I want to support an artist I buy their music, go to a concert or buy merch.

I've had a Spotify Subscription, but that got cancelled as I didn't agree to the recent Price Hike, as I wasn't interested in paying for AudioBooks I don't care about.

Now I'm rolling with YouTubeMusic and I am looking for a less shitty alternative
by A1kmm | 2025-12-21 10:21:41+00:00
In many versions of road rules (I don't know about California), having four vehicles stopped at an intersection without one of the four lanes having priority creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four vehicles are giving way to others.

Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock. It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars coordinated by different companies.
by omnimus | 2025-12-21 10:23:54+00:00
What everybody is looking for is imagination and invention. Current AI systems can give best guess statistical answer from dataset the've been fed. It is always compression.

The problem and what most people intuitively understand is that this compression is not enough. There is something more going on because people can come up with novel ideas/solutions and whats more important they can judge and figure out if the solution will work. So even if the core of the idea is “compressed” or “mixed” from past knowledge there is some other process going on that leads to the important part of invention-progress.

That is why people hate the term AI because it is just partial capability of “inteligence” or it might even be complete illusion of inteligence that is nowhere close what people would expect.
by johnisgood | 2025-12-21 10:24:10+00:00
https://www.jmail.world/thread/94b742a9202b9782dcfef7d2aaed1... and this https://www.jmail.world/thread/3a2c95682ec730d0062d6d1c5bcf5.... Why did he order these, for who?

He sure bought a lot of books. I found this that is not a book.
by sylware | 2025-12-21 10:24:43+00:00
Ofc, the code modifications and additional data are not public, neither they are online. And we are talking air gap transfer.

I repeat: the second you are online, you are cooked. Everything else is BS, probably somebody is trying to sell you something.

All you can do is to find compromise depending on the classification of the data.

And as I said, if you are making it too much hell for attackers, they will switch to social engineering.

Come on...
by Dagger2 | 2025-12-21 10:25:35+00:00
Random guess: PMTUD? Like on v4, some people fuck up their PMTUD and are incapable of realizing or fixing it, so you have to have some kind of workaround.

If setting your client machine MTU to 1280 (`ip link set mtu 1280 dev eth0` or equivalent) magically fixes it, that's your problem.
by KomoD | 2025-12-21 10:25:38+00:00
> What surprised me is how quickly these kinds of projects get treated as spam across communities, even when there’s no monetization, no ads, and no growth hacks involved. In some places, just mentioning “I built a small ranking tool” seems enough to trigger suspicion or moderation.

Because most places don't want you to post self promotion and leave, that's spammy.

> I’m not trying to promote anything here.

You are, that seems to be your only intention. Your first 2 posts (out of 3) were about promoting your site and now your third post is complaining about unsuccessfully promoting your site.

You promoted your site and then left.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-21 10:26:13+00:00
I agree.

It's easy to tell someone to connect to something like 203.0.113.88. Many of us here, and also normal folks, have been saying dotted-octets like that for decades, now, and there's a familiar patter to the way that addresses like this flow off of the tongue.

It's hard to tell someone to connect to 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e. It's literally difficult to say, like saying it is intended to be some kind of test. And on the other end? Sure, we "all" "learned" hexadecimal at some point in school, but regular humans don't use hex so it sounds like missile launch codes (at best) or some kind of sadistic prank (at worst) to them. It reeks of phonic unfamiliarity and disdain.

(This is the part where the DNS folks invariably show up to announce that I'm holding it wrong. And I love DNS; I do. But I'm really not interested in maintaining public DNS for the dynamic addresses at home on my LAN.)

(After that, it becomes time for the would-be abbreviators to appear and tell me that the address for this computer is wrong, somehow, as if I ever had an active part in selecting the address to begin with.)
by xandrius | 2025-12-21 10:29:07+00:00
I've had the same exact feeling for a while: several people known to be in the files are not the purest people we know and I'm not sure them being there will have any effect whatsoever. Taking Trump, what would really change to his image? All his supporters are already ok with the stuff he did/said and his opponents are already against him.

All his political/business allies won't easily switch as they stay his connections and money, not his clean image.

It just feels like a real-life reality show to keep the news flowing and people just enough bewildered and curious to keep coming back for more. Basically the perfect material for a while.

Especially with all the hyper redacted parts, groups can start literally reading between the lines and make unfounded allegations to create even more clicks.
by protimewaster | 2025-12-21 10:29:13+00:00
That's all I've found as well, but, personally, I find that a bit unclear, for a couple of reasons. First, are they saying that the game itself can use generative AI, but it can't be used in the development of the game? So that would mean that if the game itself generates random levels using a generative AI approach, that's allowed, but, if I were to use that same code to pre-generate and manually modify the levels, that wouldn't be allowed because I'm now using generative AI as part of the development process? I.e., I can create a game that itself is a generative AI, but I can't use that AI I've built as part of the development of a downstream game?

And, second, what counts as generative AI? A lot of people wouldn't include procedural generative techniques in that definition, but, AFAIK, there's no consensus on whether traditional procedural approaches should be described as "generative AI".

And a third thing is, if I use an IDE that has generative AI, even for something as simple as code completion, does that run afoul of the rule? So, if I used Visual Studio with its default IntelliCode settings, that's not allowed because it has a generative AI-based autocomplete?
by mkl | 2025-12-21 10:30:51+00:00
They long pre-date the demoscene, going back centuries in mathematics. Ray tracing/casting of implicit surfaces (described with SDFs and more general signed functions) for computer graphics goes back to the 1960s and 70s. The 1990s demoscene 2D metaball effects were based on computer graphics work by Jim Blinn for Cosmos in 1980. Most current applications are based on that long ongoing research. (I did my PhD in implicit surface stuff, so I've seen tons of academic papers on it going back ages, and I never ran into demoscene methods in that context.)
by wseqyrku | 2025-12-21 10:32:11+00:00
> Your grocer and your landlord don't accept crypto

I don't mind using fiat for groceries. I'm talking only about digital currencies for digital services. That's it, at least for starters.

> Its gotta be better on other merits too.

There, a market niche deliberately being overlooked. You can totally reverse benchmark this whole thing if you can actually see its current flaws that prevents it to become mainstream.

> and now you've just reinvented the problem you were trying to solve

One intractable problem at a time my friend. I feel like those are the excuses we've been telling ourselves to not even try. The fact of the matter is that it's going to take time even after you have the infrastructure in place. You can read endless HN comments complaining about, let's call it the situation, on the side but I believe if anything at all it's going to be a grassroots movement and it has to start somewhere. It's actually pretty straightforward, take something that is hard, that you're an expert in, and make it stupidly easy. That's the formula I use anyways but crypto is not my strong suit.
by Hackbraten | 2025-12-21 10:32:37+00:00
> Any modern Java compiler will generate identical bytecode for both. Try it yourself and see!

You may be misunderstanding something here.

If you follow the varargs-style recommendation, then concatenation occurs in the log class.

If you follow the guard-style recommendation, then the interpolated expressions will not be evaluated unless the log level matches.

In the naive approach, concatenation always occurs and all expressions which are part of the interpolation will be evaluated no matter the log level.

Could it be that you were thinking about StringBuffer vs. concatenation, an entirely unrelated problem?
by RobotToaster | 2025-12-21 10:33:35+00:00
> Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it.

I can see how you would end up in that position

You need to add constraints to your sketches. In other words tell it that the hole needs to be x distance from certain lines.

If you don't do that what you get is the equivalent of hard coding a hole location in OpenSCAD. I guess OpenSCAD just forces you to think parametrically.

Also in fusion 360 make sure timeline editing is on.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-21 10:33:55+00:00
GPU compute units are not that simple, the main difference with CPU is that they generally use a combination of wide SIMD and wide SMT to hide latency, as opposed to the power-intensive out-of-order processing used by CPU's. Performing tasks that can't take advantage of either SIMD or SMT on GPU compute units might be a bit wasteful.

Also you'd need to add extra hardware for various OS support functions (privilege levels, address space translation/MMU) that are currently missing from the GPU. But the idea is otherwise sound, you can think of the 'Mill' proposed CPU architecture as one variety of it.
by HansP958 | 2025-12-21 10:35:13+00:00
I agree. Nowadays, I systematically switch to dark mode on the websites I visit, if possible. Screens are becoming increasingly sophisticated, damaging our eyes, and HN isn't helping. I think they absolutely want to maintain their identity, but as a developer, I'm sure it wouldn't take too much effort to add a dark mode, given HN's simplistic design.
by realusername | 2025-12-21 10:35:34+00:00
I would disagree, code is as much the product in games as the assets.

Games always have their game engine touch and often for indie games it's a good part of the process. See for example Clair Obscur here which clearly has the UE5 caracter hair. It's what the game can and cannot do and shapes the experience.

Then the gameplay itself depend a lot on how the code was made and iterations on the code also shape the gameplay.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-21 10:36:42+00:00
> Not sure what was unexpected about the multi GPU part. It's very well known that most LLM frameworks including llama.cpp splits models by layers, which has sequential dependency, and so multi GPU setups are completely stalled

Oh, I thought the point of transformers was being able to split the load veritcally to avoid seqential dependancies. Is it true just for training or not at all?
by barrkel | 2025-12-21 10:37:14+00:00
I don't know. I built a vector similarity system for my hobby project the "hard" way, which was mostly getting Python set up with all the dependencies (seriously, Python dependency resolution is a non-trivial problem), picking a model with the right tradeoffs, installing pgvector, picking an index that optimized my distance metric, calculating and storing vectors for all my data, and integrating routes and UI which dispatched ANN search (order by / limit) to my indexed column. I also did some clustering, and learned something of how awkward it is in practice to pick a representative vector for a cluster - and in fact you may want several.

I now know what the model does (at a black box level) and how all the parts fit together. And I have plans to build classifiers on top of the vectors I built for further processing.

The experience of fighting Python dependencies gives me more appreciation for uv over venv and will leave me less stuck whenever the LLM fails to help resolve the situation.
by Kwpolska | 2025-12-21 10:37:44+00:00
So many Web designers put zero thought into how their page looks when it is not loaded or not scrolled exactly past the trigger. So many sites say "0 happy customers", because someone thought showing incrementing numbers is cool. On this page, it opens up with a "100%" loading indicator, for a site that appears to have no interactivity that would require JS, just to show a pointless animation.
by dgfl | 2025-12-21 10:37:46+00:00
I didn’t make it up, it’s a well known talking point around string theory. I think it was first mentioned by a practicing string theorist. Of course it’s not a novel critique, but I’ve read about putting data centers in space on this website, so I think it’s worth trying to teach people how to do these sort of Fermi problems quickly.

I did indeed miss your point, it was well hidden under a lot of sarcasm. I think it is of course completely valid. People should be free to research what they want, and I’m sure string theory must be beautiful mathematics.

But if your goal is unifying QM and GR, and/or achieving a theory of everything (as is for most theoretical physicists), then me and a growing fraction of physicists think that it’s not a promising avenue. I’m not advocating for only working on “useful” things, because such a theory is not likely to yield much profit to anyone in the foreseeable future anyway. But if you state that a unifying theory is your goal and seek funding for that goal, then string theory should move to the backstage. The mathematics department would rightfully be happy to house you otherwise.
by Hamuko | 2025-12-21 10:38:04+00:00
There's not that much irony considering how people into indie games are more about the art and craft of video games, whereas The Game Awards is a giant marketing cannon for the video game industry, and the video game industry has always been about squeezing their employees. If they can hire fewer artists and less QA because of GenAI, they're all for it.

Just two days ago there were reports that Naughty Dog, a studio that allegedly was trying to do away with crunch, was requiring employees to work "a minimum of eight extra hours a week" to complete an internal demo.

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mab...