MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-22 22:42:05+00:00
I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time, rear-projection set in the 80s.

It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch something, and the color drained out of his face like doing anything like that would surely result in a very painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and played with bugs or something instead.)

As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.

It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful. But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection set, so I guess there's that.

The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot better, and so did processing (including using tricks like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed thing), and the colors improved. Things like line doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs; after all, they were both the same tech.

So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.

Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems), these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell, came in smaller packages (they could often rest on furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness and geometry.

CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough, and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006 and 2009, on my timeline.

(CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for people with very serious home theaters [think positively-enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough as well.)
by eightysixfour | 2025-12-22 22:42:05+00:00
I didn't want to get into an argument over whether kids should be unattended at playgrounds or not - I don't know where the other poster is front and it seems to be based on age, density, region, etc. Where I grew up it would be weird to stay, in the city I am in it would be weird to leave them.

If you leave your kids unattended at a playground I don't see how the camera changes the risk factor in any meaningful way. Either a pedophile can expect there to be unattended children or not.
Show HN: SpecFact CLI: Reverse Engineer Legacy Python into Enforceable Contracts
by noldai | 2025-12-22 22:42:49+00:00
SpecFact CLI helps teams modernize legacy Python codebases by reverse engineering undocumented code into executable contracts with runtime enforcement.

What it does:
- AST-based analysis extracts functions, classes, dependencies from legacy code
- Generates runtime contracts (icontract + beartype) that prevent regressions
- Symbolic execution (CrossHair) finds edge cases that LLMs miss
- CI/CD integration blocks breaking changes automatically

Why brownfield-first:
- Works with undocumented code, no type hints required
- Designed for legacy modernization, not adapted from greenfield
- CLI-first: works offline, no account, zero vendor lock-in

Current status:
- Contract extraction and runtime enforcement (production-ready)
- Sidecar validation in research phase: We're investigating how to run CrossHair against unmodified codebases without requiring decorators in source. This will enable symbolic execution on third-party/legacy code without editing files. See https://github.com/nold-ai/specfact-cli/issues/57 for progress.

Quick start:

# Install slash commands (recommended for AI IDEs)
specfact init --ide cursor

# Then use in your AI IDE:
/specfact.01-import --repo .

Or CLI-only mode:

uvx specfact-cli@latest import from-code legacy-api --repo .
specfact analyze contracts --bundle legacy-api
specfact enforce sdd --sdd .specfact/sdd.yaml

Built for teams modernizing legacy Python systems in finance, healthcare, and data engineering where bugs cost millions.

Links:
- GitHub: https://github.com/nold-ai/specfact-cli
- Documentation: https://specfact.io
- Blog: https://specfact.dev/blog (technical deep-dives)

What we're looking for:
- Feedback on brownfield use cases
- Integration examples (VS Code, Cursor, GitHub Actions)
- Real-world case studies

I've been using it on my own legacy codebase and caught 4 bugs that would have shipped. Happy to answer questions!
by cube00 | 2025-12-22 22:44:09+00:00
I feel it's harder, I get clicks but no engagement.

I even have comments enabled on my Reddit ads and I don't even get ASCII wangs.

Nobody says my product is bad (or good), there's just silence.

Although with the aggressive way the AI bros are scraping my site I can imagine where all these alleged clicks are coming from.

It's a bad time when you're paying $1 a click and you still see Reddit's own ads way above yours. So it's not because they are filling space where they don't have real ads available. It makes you feel like they run their own ads to jack up the price.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-22 22:44:10+00:00
Pedantically, a monotonic function need not have a constant first derivative. To take it further, in mathematics it is accepted for a monatomic function to have a countable number of discontinuities, but of course in the context of a digital clock that only increments in discrete steps, that’s of little bearing.

But that’s all besides the point since most sane time sync clients (regardless of protocol) generally handle small deviations (i.e. normal cases) by speeding up or slowing down the system clock, not jumping it (forward or backward).
by laurencerowe | 2025-12-22 22:44:18+00:00
I think it’s quite conceivable that nuclear would be cheaper for a 100% carbon free grid.

But I don’t understand how the combination of nuclear, wind and solar would be low cost. Wouldn’t you effectively have to build out enough nuclear to cover still cloudy days at which point your wind and solar is not very useful? That sounds expensive.

I suspect we won’t end up building much nuclear because we will already have built out so much wind and solar. Nuclear is a poor fit for filling gaps in generation by intermittent renewables because fuel costs are negligible so it costs the same whether you run at 50% or 100% of rated output.

To eliminate carbon emissions entirely we will need some green hydrogen for turning into aviation fuel and as chemical feedstocks. Perhaps the gas backup will eventually burn that.
by aschobel | 2025-12-22 22:44:50+00:00
I’m basically only using the Codex CLI now. I switched around the GPT-5 timeframe because it was reliably solving some gnarly OpenTelemetry problems that Claude Code kept getting stuck on.

They feel like different coworker archetypes. Codex often does better end-to-end (plan + code in one pass). Claude Code can be less consistent on the planning step, but once you give it a solid plan it’s stellar at implementation.

I probably do better with Codex mostly due to familiarity; I’ve learned how it “thinks” and how to prompt it effectively. Opus 4.5 felt awkward for me for the same reason: I’m used to the GPT-5.x / Codex interaction style. Co-workers are the inverse, they adore Opus 4.5 and feel Codex is weird.
by cowsandmilk | 2025-12-22 22:45:00+00:00
HistoSonics has studies published with 50 patients. Their upcoming study with 5000 liver patients obviously will give more information, but we already have some.

And with that said, these studies are more relevant than the top of thread linking to a review from 2011 looking at papers from 2005-2006 for ultrasound cavitation causing metastases.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-22 22:45:02+00:00
> or not who tf knows

Right, because counterfactuals aren’t provable. It doesn’t seem to stop people from confidently stating that American hegemony was worse than the alternatives.

We know it worked well, that the entire world seems to be better off now than before ww2.
We know that west Germany did far better than east Germany. We know Japan did far better than the Asian states under the USSR’s influence. We know that things went pretty damned well overall for the whole NATOsphere after ww2.

We know WW3 didn’t happen.

We don’t know how it would have gone if it were another country “in charge” or how it would have gone if nobody was “in charge” to the degree the US was.

So just saying “Pax Americana was a pox on the world” is such an utterly asinine statement I don’t even know how to begin to address it, other than to file it under “trolls gonna troll.”
by hilti | 2025-12-22 22:45:02+00:00
I‘m a Chief Data Officer in the beverage industry. My day job is creating layers to make the incoming information meaningful. Over the past years we went from Google BigQuery to self hosted solutions using SQLite and Postgres. Recently even using JSONL for major parts of our data pipeline. I discovered the raw performance of languages like C and C++ compared to web scripting languages. I try to follow UNIX principles which means we create simple tools to work with our data that can be piped. What I learned over the years: it‘s easy to fell quickly in love with great SaaS services. At a given point in time you realize the business is (data in = super easy, data out = tough)
Human readable, append only formats like JSONL over flexibility. The strategy is that you can reprocess the data again if necessary using the tools available that year. I believe we will have tools in two years that are working superior with structured text files like JSONL.
by kazinator | 2025-12-22 22:45:03+00:00
> The bigger problem is that TCP_QUICKACK doesn’t fix the fundamental problem of the kernel hanging on to data longer than my program wants it to.

Well, of course not; it tries to reduce the problem of your kernel hanging on to an ack (or genearting an ack) longer than you would like. That pertains to received data. If the remote end is sending you data, and is paused due to filling its buffers due to not getting an ack from you, it behooves you to send an ack ASAP.

The original Berkeley Unix implementation of TCP/IP, I seem to recall, had a single global 500 ms timer for sending out acks. So when your TCP connection received new data eligible for acking, it could be as long as 500 ms before the ack was sent. If we reframe that in modern realities, we can imagine every other delay is negligible, and data is coming at the line rate of a multi gigabit connection, 500 ms represents a lot of unacknowledged bits.

Delayed acks are similar to Nagle in spirit in that they promote coalescing at the possible cost of performance. Under the assumption that the TCP connection is bidirectional and "chatty" (so that even when the bulk of the data transfer is happening in one direction, there are application-level messages in the other direction) the delayed ack creates opportunities for the TCP ACK to be piggy backed on a data transfer. A TCP segment carrying no data, only an ACK, is prevented.

As far as portability of TCP_QUICKACK goes, in C code it is as simple as #ifdef TCP_QUICKACK. If the constant exists, use it. Otherwise out of luck. If you're in another language, you have to to through some hoops depending on whether the network-related run time exposes nonportable options in a way you can test, or whether you are on your own.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-12-22 22:45:10+00:00
South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...

The proposed costs for the Westinghouse reactors in Poland and EPR2s in France are pretty much in line with the unthinkably expensive Vogtle costs. They haven’t even started building.
by jameslk | 2025-12-22 22:45:15+00:00
I’m not sure why Nevada is always brought up negatively when mentioning CO river usage but Nevada uses the least amount of water out of all states:

https://www.snwa.com/water-resources/where-water-comes-from/...

https://www.snwa.com/assets/images/colorado-river-allocation...

For indoor usage in Las Vegas for example, it recycles 99% of it:

https://lvgea.org/water/

Using water in the desert is a problem, but point to CA or AZ as poster children of abuse for that
by grumbel | 2025-12-22 22:45:27+00:00
Or from a users perspective: Why bother looking for software that fits your purpose, when you can just let the AI write one from scratch that does?

A lot of what makes software complicated is that it has to serve thousands of users with different requirements at once. With AI on the other side, that's not something a user has to worry about, they can just let the AI spawn a much smaller special purpose tool that solves exactly the problem they are having.

We might be entering the age of disposable software, where software isn't a product, but just something your AI system produces temporarily in the background for the task at hand.
by amelius | 2025-12-22 22:45:40+00:00
But I can make a similar argument about a simple multiplication:

- You have to know how the inputs are processed.

- You have to left-shift one of the operands by 0, 1, ... N-1 times.

- Add those together, depending on the bits in the other operand.

- Use an addition tree to make the whole process faster.

Does not mean that knowing the above process gives you a good insight in the concept of A*B and all the related math and certainly will not make you better at calculus.
by mattmaroon | 2025-12-22 22:45:56+00:00
Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of Americans have actually been to a Disney park. Does the fact that the vast majority of people have done something not prove that most people can afford it?

I’m not sure why the burden of proof falls not on the original comment (most Americans can’t afford to go to Disney) but rather the person asking for proof, but here you have it anyway.
by circuit10 | 2025-12-22 22:46:39+00:00
What’s wrong with vegetarian meatballs? As a vegetarian I find naming the products after what they’re imitating far more helpful that coming up with some clumsy confusing name that’s obviously trying to imply what they want to say without saying it… does anyone really read the word “vegetarian” and then still think it must have meat in it? I don’t think that’s a real problem
Show HN: Tpylo All-in-one creator support platform
by williamolsen | 2025-12-22 22:47:02+00:00
Hey HN, we built Tpylo over the past few months and would love your feedback.

The backstory is pretty simple. Creators are juggling too many platforms just to make a living. Patreon for memberships, Ko-fi for tips, Discord for community, Gumroad for selling stuff, and the list goes on. We thought there had to be a better way.

So we built something that brings it all together. One profile page where creators can accept donations, sell monthly memberships, chat with supporters in real time, and run a digital store for ebooks or courses or whatever they make. The supporter pays, money goes straight to the creator's connected account, we take a small platform fee, done.

We went with direct charges instead of holding funds. Seemed cleaner and less regulatory headache. Real-time chat runs on WebSockets so creators can talk with paying members without sending them elsewhere.

Would appreciate if you could check it out and share your thoughts. What features would make this actually useful for you as a creator or supporter?
by miki123211 | 2025-12-22 22:47:53+00:00
> Most of us confidently claimed even back in 2023 that, based on LLM architecture and training algorithms, LLMs would never be able to perform well on novel coding or mathematics tasks.

I feel like there are three groups of people:

1. Those who think that LLMs are stupid slop-generating machines which couldn't ever possibly be of any use to anybody, because there's some problem that is simple for humans but hard for LLMs, which makes them unintelligent by definition.

2. Those who think we have already achieved AGI and don't need human programmers any more.

3. Those who believe LLMs will destroy the world in the next 5 years.

I feel like the composition of these three groups is pretty much constant since the release of Chat GPT, and like with most political fights, evidence doesn't convince people either way.
by Jtsummers | 2025-12-22 22:47:56+00:00
> it could very well be that it backfires.

It's kind of hard to see the strategy you outlined as doing anything other than backfiring. Oil and other fossil fuels are consumables. Once burned, they're gone. For strategic reasons, most nations with any sense and the economic ability to do so are turning away from fossil fuels precisely due to this fact. European nations are not exceptional here, the US is actually the outlier.

Your suggested strategy is that the US wants European nations to buy more US oil, and in order to motivate them the US is demonstrating how bad oil dependence is. See Cuba (they depend on Venezuelan oil there).

How could a demonstration of the flaws of oil dependency possibly motivate the sale of US oil rather than hasten the move towards solar, wind, and other power sources?

This is why I said it's a terrible strategy. Only the non-thinking would go for it.
by em-bee | 2025-12-22 22:48:56+00:00
i don't know much about the rental market in china, but living there, always renting, i had the impression that rents do not cover the cost of the apartment. it is as if most people rent out their apartment because it would otherwise stay empty. when we finally bought an apartment, the mortgage payments were twice as high as what we would have paid for the same apartment in rent. we had a 15 year mortgage i think, so that means it takes 30 years in rent to just cover the cost of the apartment. is that profitable? i don't know. in germany rent has to be profitable.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-22 22:49:07+00:00
> I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.

That does help, and is part of the reason I myself engage with these folks from time to time, but it requires discipline to recognize when you're throwing good effort after bad.

You want to give your voice the greatest chance of being seen. Strategically responding to upvoted bad faith in a highly visible thread is a good idea. Keeping an argument alive 5-6 levels deep in a subthread that was already flagged is less so.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-22 22:49:44+00:00
I recently ran into two baffling, what felt like GPT 3.5 era completely backwards misinterpretations of an unambiguous sentence once each in Codex and CC/Sonnet a few days apart in completely different scenarios (both very early in the context window). And to be fair, they were notable partially as an "exception that proves the rule" where it was surprising to see but OP's example can definitely still happen in my experience.

I was prepared to go back to my original message and spot an obvious-in-hindsight grey area/phrasing issue on my part as the root cause but there was nothing in the request itself that was unclear or problematic, nor was it buried deep within a laundry list of individual requests in a single message. Of course, the CLI agents did all sorts of scanning through the codebase/self debate/etc in between the request and the first code output. I'm used to how modern models/agents get tripped up by now so this was an unusually clear cut failure to encounter from the latest large commercial reasoning models.

In both instances, literally just restating the exact same request with "No, the request was: [original wording]" was all it took to steer them back and didn't become a concerning pattern. But with the unpredictability of how the CLI agents decide to traverse a repo and ingest large amounts of distracting code/docs it seems much too over confident to believe that random, bizarre LLM "reasoning" failures won't still occur from time to time in regular usage even as models improve given their inherent limitations.

(If I were bending over backwards to be charitable/anthropomorphize, it would be the human failure mode of "I understood exactly what I was asked for and what I needed to do, but then somehow did the exact opposite, haha oops brain fart!" but personally I'm not willing to extend that much forgiveness/tolerance to a failure from a commercial tool I pay for...)
by myself248 | 2025-12-22 22:49:52+00:00
For some reason I remember 83Hz being the highest refresh rate supported by my XGA CRT, but I think it was only running at SVGA (800x600) in order to pull that rate.

Some demos could throw pixels into VRAM that fast, and it was wild looking. Like the 60Hz soap-opera effect but even more so.

I still feel that way looking at >30fps content since I really don't consume much of it.
by corimaith | 2025-12-22 22:50:10+00:00
There is no or ever has been a national security issue in one of the safest cities in the world. You could leave it in the doldrums for 50 more years and it wouldn't make a difference.

On the other hand, has John Lee made any real progress regarding the entwinement of the political economy and real estate developers leading to the high housing prices or overcompetition? Not really. So it's just full throated authoritarianism with no benefit. Unlike the West, HK already enjoys efficiency and infrastructure on par if not superior to Tier 1 Chinese Cities, so any appeals to "order" are farcical when the city is already far more orderly than the mainland.
by Centigonal | 2025-12-22 22:50:40+00:00
Typically, at an untowered airport, it's something closer to "{airport_colloquial_name} traffic, {your_aircraft_type} {your_n_number}. {MESSAGE}, {airport_colloquial_name} traffic"

So, "Columbia traffic, Cessna november one two three alfa bravo [N123AB], three mile final, full stop, runway one eight, Columbia traffic"

At a towered airport, you'd say "Columbia tower" instead, and you don't have to repeat it at the end of your message.
by noahbp | 2025-12-22 22:50:40+00:00
It doesn't reduce the amount of RAM you need at all. It does reduce the amount of VRAM/HBM you need, however, since having all parameters/experts in one pass loaded on your GPU substantially increases token processing and generation speed, even if you have to load different experts for the next pass.

Technically you don't even need to have enough RAM to load the entire model, as some inference engines allow you to offload some layers to disk. Though even with top of the line SSDs, this won't be ideal unless you can accept very low single-digit token generation rates.
Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet?
by antfie | 2025-12-22 22:50:53+00:00
It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn. Why are we still putting up with it? I’m surprised there’s not been a contender yet, or maybe I am not aware and perhaps that could be the rub; the challenge of acquiring enough traffic for the network effect to take hold.