MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-09 06:38:53+00:00
> You're arguing from an end-user perspective,

No.I am arguing from a software engineer's perspective tackling a systems design problem.

> I'm pointing out that the Internet wasn't designed to solve easy but fragile problems but instead was intended to be a resilient network capable of surviving failures and route around them.

Irrelevant. Engineers design systems that remain functioning in spite of their failure modes. Some failure modes are irredeemable. Even structural engineers don't design structures to withstand all conceivable earthquakes, because they understand that mitigating that failure modes is unrealistic.

The same goes for software. You do not build your WebApps to remain working when half of the internet dies. This means scenarios such as AWS, GCP or Cloudflare being out.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-09 06:39:11+00:00
Fair enough. I'm also not a geoscientist, and to clarify I didn't mean to imply any specific statistical effect there. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a series of EQs might tend to increase in intensity.

In reality I think (layman's impression) that there's rough (post hoc) evidence for both things. Foreshocks followed by noticably larger EQs as well as trains of progressively smaller EQs.
by tguvot | 2025-12-09 06:39:28+00:00
anecdotal presence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_Palestinian_...

As you probably missed news from decade ago, when PA and Hamas had one of their fights, PA stopped paying for gaza bills and salaries of 50k or so employees in gaza. International news had headlines that hundreds of thousands of people in gaza will starve to death because they have no money to buy food and that all services in gaza will collapse and it will be humanitarian catastrophe. So under pressure from international organizations and news Israel allowed qatari funds to be transferred to gaza in order to sustain pa employees and services

and israel spent $750m on advertisement, because as you prove it, people don't know history beyond what is shown on latest tiktok

ps. also jews in west bank are indigenous population that was ethnically cleansed by jordan in 1948. not "colonizers"
by mellosouls | 2025-12-09 06:41:27+00:00
Off-topic: it's been a while since I looked in on Nautil.us, which I used to read articles on quite regularly.

What a decline. Straight in I was hit by article restriction warnings and the whole thing was half adverts.

An interesting publication seems to have turned into yet another tatfest.

Doesn't look good for it's longevity as a source of decent reads, a shame.

Ps. Thanks to the submitter though for taking the time to add an archive link.
My Apple notes should've been my journal
by lolisimus | 2025-12-09 06:42:41+00:00
Personally, I always wanted to start journaling, but I could never develop a habit of doing it daily/weekly/monthly… churn was fast

However, I think that apple had a real good shot at taking already something that exists (notes) and supercharging it into a journal.

Like I would pay good money to see my notes from 10 years ago. Even things like a to do list - you can totally see where my mind was, what I was doing, what I cared about… or travel plans, like converting that today via llms should be a no brainer into some sort of journal. Basically by taking something I already do today (writing in my notes), erasing that initial step of writing from scratch, and then maybe asking me to fill in the gaps. That would be so cool

I just think that sometimes people jump into adding a new app.. new feature.. that on paper looks amazing.. but creating new habits is extremely difficult. Just take what already exists and super charge it :-)
by foobarbecue | 2025-12-09 06:42:56+00:00
My favorite is this advert I keep getting that says "Imagine being able to build an app with your name on it!" I'm like... if you're struggling with the part where you put your name on it... and that's the priority.. I don't know what to tell you.

Ah, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FEWLvKztD0
by irjustin | 2025-12-09 06:43:33+00:00
> if physics was a branch of sociology

ehhhhh but this way more apt on how it works (than you'd probably like) once you venture outside the realm of testable.

PBS Space time recently did one on multi-verse[0], watch it and, you'll get the feeling sections of this really do feel like sociology/psychology.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX1EfW3euY4
Show HN: I built a "Netflix-grade" retro game player for the browser(React+WASM)
by beingmudit | 2025-12-09 06:44:18+00:00
Hi HN, I'm a solo dev who spent the last few weeks obsessively trying to solve the "last mile" problem of browser emulation: making it actually feel good to play.

While the core tech (Libretro/WASM) is solid, wrapping it in a UI that feels "native" is a deep rabbit hole. I built Koin Deck Player to solve the glue-code headaches, and I've open-sourced it as a drop-in React component.

It handles the tricky engineering bits so you don't have to:

- Latency Tiers: Automatically enables "Run-Ahead" (calculating frames in advance) for 8/16-bit systems to get sub-frame latency. - Performance: Detects SharedArrayBuffer support to switch N64/PS1 emulation to threaded video rendering, preventing UI freezes. - Mobile Controls: A custom GPU-accelerated virtual controller that uses heuristic multi-touch (sliding finger between buttons works) and haptics. - Audio: Handles the notorious auto-play/resume AudioContext quirks across browsers.

I built this because I believe preservation shouldn't just be about archiving file, it should be about making the experience delightful.

Repo is MIT licensed. I'd love to hear your feedback on the input latency!
by daemonologist | 2025-12-09 06:44:31+00:00
I agree - the results on the finetunes are not very surprising. The trained-from-scratch ResNets (Figure 2 and Section 3.2.1) are definitely more interesting, though somewhat limited in scope.

In any case, my impression is that this is not immediately more useful than a LoRA (and is probably not intended to be), but is maybe an avenue for further research.
by Moru | 2025-12-09 06:45:26+00:00
Not only american portions. I'm a remote worker since 20+ years. My first visit to the main workplace eating lunch was a revelation. The portion size was gigantic! And my coworkers (none having a physical job) was done within 15 minutes while I took a lot longer to not even finish half of my portion. It was at least five times my normal lunch portion. Insane. And the prices were lower than our village.
by antonvs | 2025-12-09 06:45:28+00:00
Addendum: "I could care less" is a perfectly natural and recognizable idiom in some circles. To someone unfamiliar, it can seem strange, but that's true of many idioms.

The objections to it, though, fall broadly into two categories: ignorance, and bigotry. The former becomes the latter when someone refuses to recognize their ignorance, and doubles down on it.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-09 06:45:32+00:00
I think my software engineering job will be safe so long as big companies keep using average code as their training set. This is because the average developer creates unnecessary complexity which creates more work for me.

The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like interest on normal debt.

Whenever I join a new project, within 6 months, I control/maintain all the core modules of the system and everything ends up hooked up to my config files, running according to the architecture I designed. Happened at multiple companies. The code looks for the shortest path to production and creates a moat around engineers who can make their team members' jobs easier.

IMO, it's not so different to how entrepreneurship works. But with code and processes instead of money and people as your moat. I think once AI can replace top software engineers, it will be able to replace top entrepreneurs. Scary combination. We'll probably have different things to worry about then.
by esperent | 2025-12-09 06:46:21+00:00
> a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.

Another way of looking at this is that the main players have a vested interest in keep it as a casino. Therefore it'll never become a currency, because casinos and monetary systems have fundamentally different requirements when it comes to stability.

Instability in cryptocurrency is a feature. It'll never go away unless it gets regulated to the point that all the things that differentiate it from the fiat monetary system are gone.
by godelski | 2025-12-09 06:46:39+00:00
I think there's two maybe subtle, but key concepts you're missing.

1) "pertaining" 2) architecture

1) Yes, they're trained on different data but "tune" implies most of the data is identical. So it should be surprising if the models end up significantly different.

2) the architecture and training methods matter. As a simple scenario to make things a bit easier to understand let's say we have two models with identical architectures and we'll use identical training methods (e.g. optimizer, learning rate, all that jazz) but learn on different data. Also to help so you can even reproduce this on your own let's train one on MNIST (numbers) and the other in FashionMNIST (clothing).

Do you expect these models to have similar latent spaces? You should! This is because despite the data being very different visually there are tons of implicit information that's shared (this is a big reason we do tuning in the first place!). One of the most obvious things you'll see is subnetworks that do edge detection (there's a famous paper showing this with convolutions but transformers do this too, just in a bit different way). The more similar the data (orders shouldn't matter too much with modern training methods but it definitely influences things) the more similar this will be too. So if we trained on LAION we should expect it to do really well on ImageNet because even if there aren't identical images (there are some) there are the same classes (even if labels are different)[0].

If you think a bit here you'll actually realize that some of this will happen even if you change architectures because some principles are the same. Where the architecture similarity and training similarity really help is that they bias features being learned at the same rate and in the same place. But this idea is also why you can distill between different architectures, not just by passing the final output but even using intermediate information.

To help, remember that these models converge. Accuracy jumps a lot in the beginning then slows. For example you might get 70% accuracy in a few epochs but need a few hundred to get to 90% (example numbers). So ask yourself "what's being learned first and why?" A lot will make more sense if you do this.

[0] I have a whole rant on the indirect of saying "zero shot" on ImageNet (or COCO) when trained in things like LAION or JFT. It's not zero shot because ImageNet is in distribution! We wouldn't say "we zero shotted the test set" smh
by digitaltrees | 2025-12-09 06:47:25+00:00
When did silicon valley shift from "making the world a better place through disintermediation of relational data structures" to "own the means of production, control all government and bring back public hanging for masculine leadership"? Are they immature enough to think that people will just accept this without pushback? This is not the SV I believed in, and it won't end well for anyone.
by amatecha | 2025-12-09 06:48:24+00:00
it has nothing to do with the brand and everything to do with the fact they are still a damn good mp3 player, especially when you swap in a brand new battery and a gigantic-capacity SD card (which also greatly reduces the weight of the device). The click wheel is still one of the most slick controls for a handheld electronic device I've ever seen. Plus there's even an open source replacement firmware for most iPods (among other mp3 players), adding plenty of neat features: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/WhyRockbox
by NBJack | 2025-12-09 06:48:39+00:00
If 8 had followed through on its narrative promises, it would have had a chance. But unfortunately, much like a modern LLM that exceeds its context window, it lost its way in the final act.

As for sequels, we are at a weird time in history. Due maybe in part just how prevalent media is and how easy (relatively) it is to create, we've been super-saturated in "like X but with Y" stories. We have dedicated websites mapping tropes. It's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done a few million times. AI will probably accelerate that, and I can't say I know what comes next.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-09 06:50:25+00:00
So the rule of thumb is that: if the pictogram is always same, then as in Shannon's model, it conveys no information, and thus is decorative. Discard it.

One of first programs that put pictograms in menus was Microsoft Word. But the way Word did it was entirely different from what we do now. Microsoft Word had toolbars and their buttons, of course, were mostly pictorial. Toolbars could be turned on and off and users could assemble their own toolbars. Microsoft Word's menus displayed pictograms only for the commands that could also be called with currently visible toolbars. Have a toolbar visible? Its pictograms will appear in the menu. Closed that toolbar? The pictograms disappeared. The pictogram did not merely decorate a command, but also provided a hint that the user could call the command with a toolbar. This is informational. This is the right use.
by Mawr | 2025-12-09 06:50:59+00:00
What is this horseshit.

What exactly does specifically engine efficiency have to do with horse usage? Cars like the Ford Model T entered mass production somewhere around 1908. Oh, and would you look at the horse usage graph around that date! sigh

The chess ranking graph seems to be just a linear relationship?

> This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires.

>

> Claude, meanwhile, was now answering 30,000 questions a month; eight times as many questions as me & mine ever did.

So more == better. sigh. Ran any, you know, studies to see the quality of those answers? I too can consult /dev/random for answers at a rate of gigabytes per second!

> I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic.

Yeah. I can tell. Somebody's high on their own supply here.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-09 06:51:15+00:00
Thank you! Yes, the async nature you highlight is another huge thing I omitted. I would love to read more of your thinking on that. It's so unnatural to conversation, and yet we're "domesticated" to that via letters, but Internet async, and its public "forever-ness" is a new beast. Please write more about that if you like.
by bhaviav100 | 2025-12-09 06:51:29+00:00
I’ve been working in RevOps for 10 years, and one pattern keeps showing up: accounts don’t churn because of usage issues first, they churn because the champion drifts away.

Champion drift is silent. No ticket. No alert. No one notices until renewal dies.

I wanted a small, code-first way to detect this earlier, so I built a tiny FastAPI service:

- You send a list of stakeholders, their roles, activity dates, and renewal date - The API returns a risk score (0 to 1), a risk level, and the reasons - It flags things like: * Champion hasn't been seen in 60 to 90 days * Champion left the company * Renewal is approaching without an active internal owner

Repository: https://github.com/malukutty/champion-drift-detector-api Interactive docs at /docs once you run it locally.

This is not a product. Just a minimal piece of logic that I think should exist in the world. If you have ideas to make the scoring smarter or want to extend it, I’d love feedback.
by franga2000 | 2025-12-09 06:52:06+00:00
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

The amount of articles on HN that render perfectly, then vanish a second later and are replaced by this error message is insane. Yes, I'm using an old unmaintained Android HN reader with a questionable webview. No, that's not an excuse to delete a perfectly rendered from right in front of my eyes.
by diimdeep | 2025-12-09 06:52:59+00:00
Ё-моё, this is really bad, I am so glad that I never upgraded to Tahoe.

Can we just stop endless design churn and resists urge to innovate in a fashion industry manner in software UI ? This is ridiculous.

And f. the product managers that pushing for this, f. the SIP, lets reverse engineer the crap out of this and reverse all this changes with easy to use system level patch.
by amatecha | 2025-12-09 06:53:01+00:00
yeah I still have my old Panasonic SL-SX410 from 1999 or so, barely larger than the CD itself and with included AAA rechargeable NiMH batteries - kind of special at the time and it would charge the batteries itself (no separate charging station needed). I actually still have the original batteries and they still hold a very small charge. Maybe can listen to one or two songs lol
by keepamovin | 2025-12-09 06:53:22+00:00
Actual title in YouTubese: Why YOU should NEVER RETIRE in Vietnam 9 Reasons

This video is so true. As someone who lived OS, for more than a decade, this guy has a lot of insight. His other videos (spanning basically the whole globe) are high quality too, if you can see beyond the YouTube decoration. His insight is great.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-09 06:53:32+00:00
We are now at a point where the tech can help with both of those, today. You can have a cc session "in a loop" going through your docs / code and try to do x and y, and if it gets stuck, that's a pretty good signal that something sucks there. At least you can get a heatmap of what works ootb, and what needs more eyes.
by rramadass | 2025-12-09 06:55:18+00:00
> but wonder if I'm still falling behind or doing something wrong.

This is normal with all that is going on in the industry and the AI/ML hype. But, one should not allow that to lead to "analysis paralysis".

> specifically with how I should be positioning myself. ... Does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions on this?

You have a stable job; hence your entire focus (for now) should be to "grow" in your job/organization. This means taking more responsibilities both technical/non-technical and demonstrating your long-term commitment to management. On the technical side, start with "full stack development" both frontend and backend so you can contribute end-to-end to the entire product line. Learn/Use all available tools (AI and otherwise) to demonstrate independent initiative. Step up for any tasks which might not have a owner (eg. CI/CD etc.). Keep your boss/higher-ups informed so as to maintain visibility throughout the organization. Learn more about the problem domain, interact more with Marketing/Sales so as to become the liaison between Engineering and rest of the organization/clients.

Generally, all higher management look for initiative and independent drive so that they can delegate work with the assurance that it will be taken care of and that is what you need to provide.
Show HN: Zonformat– 35–60% fewer LLM tokens using zero-overhead notation
by ronibhakta | 2025-12-09 06:55:40+00:00
hey HN!

Roni from India — ex-Google Summer of Code(GSoC) @ internet archive, full-stack dev.

got frustrated watching json bloat my openai/claude bills by 50%+ on redundant syntax, so i built ZON over a few weekends: zero-overhead notation that compresses payloads ~50% vs json (692 tokens vs 1,300 on gpt-5-nano benchmarks) while staying 100% human-readable and lossless.

Playground -> https://zonformat.org/playground ROI calculator -> https://zonformat.org/savings

<2kb typescript lib with 100% test coverage. drop-in for openai sdk, langchain js/ts, claude, llama.cpp, streaming, zod schemas—validates llm outputs at runtime with zero extra cost.

Benchmarks -> https://zonformat.org/#benchmarks

try it: npm i zon-format or uv add zon-format, then encode/decode in <10s (code in readme). full site with benchmarks: https://zonformat.org

github → https://github.com/ZON-Format

harsh feedback on perf, edge cases, or api very welcome. if it saves you a coffee's worth of tokens, a star would be awesome

let's make llm prompts efficient again
by jackdoe | 2025-12-09 06:56:51+00:00
I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).

I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes.

I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate.

But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :)

Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth.

We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.
by fy20 | 2025-12-09 06:56:55+00:00
Right, as a UK tabloid I'm surprised they didn't mention that the UK has similar laws. If you are overcharged you can ask for a refund, and the store has to honour it:

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...

In the 00s I worked for a supermarket that would always honour the price on the label if you pointed out an error (we'd then remove the label with the error).

We had teams that would regularly check all the labels to make sure they are not out of date. Nowadays many stores where I live now use e-paper displays that update automatically.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-09 06:57:11+00:00
They can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not).

No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the capabilities are here.