MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by viraptor | 2025-12-02 16:59:38+00:00
I've changed the latency of actual services as well as core web vials many times and... no. Turns out the line is not that steep. For the range 200ms-1s, it's pretty much flat. Sure, you can start seeing issues for multi second requests, but that's terrible processing time. A change like eliminating intercontinental transfer latency - barely visible in results in ecommerce.

There's this old meme of Amazon seeing a difference for every 100ms latency and I've never seen it actually reproduced in a controlled way. Even when CF tries to advertise lower latency https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/learning/performance/more/w... their data is companies reducing it by whole seconds. "Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%" - that's not steep. When there's a claim about improvements per 100ms, it's still based on averaging multi-second data like in https://auditzy.com/blog/impact-of-fast-load-times-on-user-e...

In short - if you have something extremely interactive, I'm sure it matters for experience. For a typical website loading in under 1s, edge will barely matter. If you have data proving otherwise, I'd genuinely love to see that. For websites loading in over 1s, it's likely much easier to improve the core experience than split thing out into edge.
by barrell | 2025-12-02 16:59:43+00:00
If you wanted examples, you needed only ask :)

These are screenshots from that week: https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1995900100174880806

I'm not going to share the prompt because (1) it's very long (2) there were dozens of variations and (3) it seems like poor business practices to share the most indefensible part of your business online XD
by browningstreet | 2025-12-02 16:59:55+00:00
Your first sentence is belied by everything else you wrote.

Saying weird/extreme shit and then building a movement is a way of qualifying initiates and those willing to rally to the cause. It's part of the cult programming playbook. You build an in-crowd and you aim their energies at the out-crowd. It often leads to more unhinged positions too.. these things don't self-correct.

Thiel's a loon, Elon's a loon, Trump's a loon, Vought's a loon.

Pointed dismissiveness completely misses the point.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-02 17:00:00+00:00
I guess it depends on exactly what kind of information you want. Frequentist analysis will give you the probability of getting an exact 100/100 split in a world where the coin was fair. That probability is about 0.056. Or you can go for p values and say that it's well within the 95% confidence interval, or whatever value. But that's not very useful on its own. What we typically want is some notion of the probability that the coin is fair. This is often confused with the probability of getting the result given a fair coin (e.g. 5% probability X would happen by chance, therefore 95% probability that the null hypothesis is false) but it's very different. In this context, the question people are interested in is "how likely is it that Fleming/Mendel p-hacked their results, given the suspicious perfection of those results?" Analogous to "how likely is it that the coin is fair, given the exact even 100/100 split we got?" And for that, you need some notion of what unfairness might look like and what the prior probability was of getting an unfair coin.
Show HN: 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator
by swesnow | 2025-12-02 17:00:12+00:00
A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate).

Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.
by codyb | 2025-12-02 17:00:13+00:00
I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.

And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.
by Dwedit | 2025-12-02 17:00:26+00:00
The "every second version" rule may be a meme, but it does not reflect the actual release order of Windows, nor properly count the NT series. It only really applies to sentiment surrounding Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. But that leaves out Windows 95, most versions of Windows NT, and Windows 2000.
by Yokolos | 2025-12-02 17:00:33+00:00
He's worked on an impressive number of great games. Prey, SW Kotor 2, Fallout New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2, Icewind Dale 1+2 and Alpha Protocol (ok, arguably great) jump out at me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Avellone#Works
by lbutler | 2025-12-02 17:00:50+00:00
I'm building epanet-js[0], a local-first web application for simulating water network.

The goal is to replace clunky, expensive enterprise desktop tools (which often charge $10k+ for a wrapped version of the open-source US EPA engine). We want our version to be frictionless: login optional, runs entirely in the browser, and saves files locally to your device.

We are using the Functional Source License (FSL) to keep it sustainable while remaining open.

[0] https://epanetjs.com/
by nanfinitum | 2025-12-02 17:01:26+00:00
Yes we can actually.

I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods. They are worshipped and invited to all the events worth going to (meetups, hackathons, etc.). Everyone wants to be like them.

And it seems to me to be a geographical problem too. In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance bros), and people openly express disdain for them and their greed.
by Hnus | 2025-12-02 17:02:00+00:00
The flakes were the main UX/DX improvement for me. Before them I honestly could not do anything. The learning curve was so incredibly steep it almost felt like the people behind Nix were being malicious or intentionally gatekeeping. You finally stumble onto something you can at least partly understand, but then the powers that be throw two last obstacles at you like,

First, flakes are "experimental", so you have to enable them. Back then there were like three slightly different CLI commands to do it, and it felt like none worked from like 5 tutorial tabs I had open, putting it `experimental-features =` into flake you are trying to switch to does not work obviously.

Then you hit the classic situation where your flake is not committed or staged, so Nix refuses to see it. And instead of telling you that, it prints this abomination of error message "error: path '/nix/store/0ccnxa25whszw7mgbgyzdm4nqc0zwnm8-source/flake.nix' does not exist" (https://determinate.systems/blog/changelog-determinate-nix-3...)

I would not wish learning Nix from zero on my worst enemy, and I say that as someone who uses nix-darwin, devShells, deploy-rs and so on every day. The UX/DX is really bad, but nothing else comes close to its capabilities.

Sorry for rant but without flakes I would not make it.
by ashleyn | 2025-12-02 17:02:04+00:00
I've always suspected this mentality had a lot to do with why Peter Thiel is like that. Growing up in the wreckage of the AIDS crisis and thinking to yourself, "I don't have to go down with them. I don't ever have to be like them. I'm still here, because I'm smarter, I'm better than them." I'd never admit any of this publicly, but I have a lot of similar thoughts as a trans woman who slipped through all the cracks and ended up wealthy in my thirties. Poverty is the tip of the discrimination spear and you really could buy your way out of it all.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-02 17:02:12+00:00
My parents older windows 10 laptop was getting slow and battery wasn't great.

They bought a new windows 11 laptop from Costco for $600. Yes cheap, but not total garbage.

Tried using it for a few weeks. Worse performance that their 6 year old similarly cheap laptop running windows 10.

Returned new computer. I installed Linux Mint Mate and bought an Chinese battery for $30. Laptop better than new.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-02 17:02:26+00:00
I might independently invent a cartoon character of a black mouse with a tan face that wears white gloves and red bibs and wish to publish a comic book featuring that character on the cover, but I'll never be able to do that -- no matter how long I wait: We have trademark law in the way.

Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they never automatically time out as a mere function of the calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse, they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney Company.

The addition of copyright makes it all a double-whammy. Trademarks can already last as long as time itself; copyright doesn't also have to be that way at all.

14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose, if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well, and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.

(Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of those is timing out soon and I really should check on it.)
by snohobro | 2025-12-02 17:03:24+00:00
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-02 17:03:33+00:00
> Sanders and Mamdani are about as far left of center as one can get at the moment

No, they aren’t. They are about as far left of center as you can get and be competitive in US elections, maybe, but that’s a very different thing. There’s a lot to their left (as you an see from the by the opposition from leftist as sellouts to capitalist/imperialist/etc. institutions both have.)
by init0 | 2025-12-02 17:03:51+00:00
SEP-1865 MCP Apps Extension, even though in draft currently, will change how AI agents deliver interactive experiences.

The idea: MCP tools return HTML/CSS/JS directly. The client renders it in a sandboxed iframe. That's it.

Your AI agent calls a tool, gets back a full interactive UI. Dashboard, form, chart - whatever you need.

How it works: - Tool returns text/html+mcp resource - Client renders in iframe with CSP - UI talks back via JSON-RPC 2.0 postMessage - Fully sandboxed, secure by default

Built a sample implementation with vanilla Web Components. This is where MCP is heading.
by AndyKelley | 2025-12-02 17:03:59+00:00
Overall this article is accurate and well-researched. Thanks to Daroc Alden for due diligence. Here are a couple of minor corrections:

> When using an Io.Threaded instance, the async() function doesn't actually do anything asynchronously — it just runs the provided function right away.

While this is a legal implementation strategy, this is not what std.Io.Threaded does. By default, it will use a configurably sized thread pool to dispatch async tasks. It can, however, be statically initialized with init_single_threaded in which case it does have the behavior described in the article.

The only other issue I spotted is:

> For that use case, the Io interface provides a separate function, asyncConcurrent() that explicitly asks for the provided function to be run in parallel.

There was a brief moment where we had asyncConcurrent() but it has since been renamed more simply to concurrent().
by cbb330 | 2025-12-02 17:04:02+00:00
Sorry, but that take is complete garbage.

Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successful. And honestly, Thiel’s worldview has real strengths: he’s been early and right on remote work, the stagnation of atom-based industries, the broken incentives in higher education, the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, and the need for bold technological breakthroughs instead of endless regulation. PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX (as an early investor), and backing young founders through the Thiel Fellowship have created massive value and progress. Dismissing all that because he’s rich and contrarian is lazy.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-02 17:04:10+00:00
Anyone know if this stops the truly diabolical Windows 11 behavior where it removes the options to "Shut Down without updating" and "Reboot without updating?" At some point, the only option to shut down your computer is "Shut Down and update." I've gotten to the point where I just yank the power cord to turn off my computer, because Microsoft doesn't permit any other way.
by empath75 | 2025-12-02 17:04:15+00:00
I think the reason this is interesting to mathematicians is that he was working with an axiomatic system that is fairly new, and _in particular_ is thought not to be strong enough to be able to prove the pigeon hole principle. Since he proved that all these other theorems are equivalent to the pigeonhole principle, all of those other theorems are probably also not able to be proven with PV1.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-02 17:04:34+00:00
> I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.

Fortunately, Silicon Valley has now provided a machine to do that for you.

I'd be somewhat concerned that this type of severe detachment from reality may become more common as LLMs make the obsequious ego-buffing that was previously available only to billionaires too cheap to meter.
by adolph | 2025-12-02 17:04:36+00:00
If you can parse the academic jargon and get past the ad hominem, the article is a basic meditation on how the state of information technology continues to support both centralization and distribution of decisions.

This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by international law.
by silisili | 2025-12-02 17:04:47+00:00
I agree with the last part, but in many ways that had already been done or at least accelerated in the era of bootcamps.

I had the displeasure of working with more than a few folks who got into it for the money and claimed it was easy, who thought it was a job of mainly Googling and copy pasting. The sad thing is that these people often survive fine in a big enough org.

Yeah, maybe I'm gatekeeping a bit, but it felt like it really cheapened the image of the job.

But you're right, vibecoding is likely going to accelerate such diminishing further.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-12-02 17:04:53+00:00
Matt is amazing. After checking out his compiler optimizations, maybe check out the recent interview I did with him.

What I’ve come to believe is this: you should work at a level of abstraction you’re comfortable with, but you should also understand the layer beneath it. If you’re a C programmer, you should have some idea of how the C runtime works, and how it interacts with the operating system. You don’t need every detail, but you need enough to know what’s going on when something breaks. Because one day printf won’t work, and if the layer below is a total mystery, you won’t even know where to start looking. So: know one layer well, have working knowledge of the layer under it, and, most importantly, be aware of the shape of the layer below that.

https://corecursive.com/godbolt-rule-matt-godbolt/

Also this article in acmqueue by Matt is not new at all, but super great introduction to these types of optimizations.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3372264
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-02 17:04:53+00:00
I guess you have not tried GPT 5 Pro

GPT’s differentiator is they focused on training for “thinking” while Gemini prioritized instant response. Medium thinking is not the limit of utility

Re: overparameterization specifically Medium and High are also identically parameterized

Medium will also dynamically use even higher thinking than High. High is fixed at a higher level rather than leaving it to be dynamic, though somewhat less than Medium’s upper limit
by stopachka | 2025-12-02 17:05:16+00:00
I am sorry this made you feel depressed. I think there are some positives to consider too though:

1. More people that wanted to make games can.

Thanks to unreal engine, you don't need to be a Tim Sweeney level-expert to make compelling games. I see LLMs as another abstraction in the same spirit.

2. You get more leverage

The more abstractions you have, the more you can do with less. This means less bureaucracy, more of a chance to make _exactly_ what you wanted.

I understand how the craft changes underneath you, and that can feel depressing, but if we see it as tools, I think there's lots of good ahead.
by ethin | 2025-12-02 17:05:47+00:00
One thing the old Zig async/await system theoretically allowed me to do, which I'm not certain how to accomplish with this new io system without manually implementing it myself, is suspend/resume. Where you could suspend the frame of a function and resume it later. I've held off on taking a stab at OS dev in Zig because I was really, really hoping I could take advantage of that neat feature: configure a device or submit a command to a queue, suspend the function that submitted the command, and resume it when an interrupt from the device is received. That was my idea, anyway. Idk if that would play out well in practice, but it was an interesting idea I wanted to try.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-02 17:06:08+00:00
In both cases- ageism and racism, the employer culture is hiring less qualified workers based on criteria other than skill and competence. That necessarily means they have a lower caliber of expertise on average, as they are artificially decreasing the pool size of potential candidates. Moreover, if they have a discriminatory hiring practice in the first place, it is very unlikely that they are really selecting for competence even within the preferred demographic. For an extreme example, look at the current US administration, hiring only people with "Mar-a-lago face" combined with them needing to have a particular ideology and extreme lack of ethics, necessarily makes virtually all of the hires incompetent. They aren't, presumably specifically seeking incompetent hires, it's just the only people left given the fact that they select for things other than competence first.

I hire software engineers, and given all of the discrimination in the field, my willingness to hire women, minorities, and older people gives me a substantial advantage over those I am competing against that have discriminatory hiring practices. Although I'm not selecting for discriminated against groups, in practice I hire almost exclusively from them, because there are a surplus of extremely qualified people in those demographics that are getting rejected from everywhere else. I'm sure there are a ton of competent young white men in software engineering, but they're never among my top applicants, presumably because they've already been hired elsewhere.

This widespread discrimination pre-loads the applicant pool, such that the effect is enormous: you are getting substantially inferior employees if you have discriminatory hiring practices, because so many others do to, so your "preferred demographic" is already depleted of competent applicants.
by xphos | 2025-12-02 17:06:13+00:00
You need downvotes for this kind of behavior haha. Maybe I need to be more important for that feature :)

The parent thread is right though medicare for all would definitely be cheaper. Larger pool to spread the risk. But more importantly we make every N healthcare provider work with M insurence. NxM complexitiy is scaling the cost of healthcare. There are simplifications but the the M insurence providers are the producer of all complexity not the N healthcare providers so basically all that bueracractic overhead also kill costs. Arguablly that wasted bueracracy equals quite a few healthcare insurence employees which I think politically complicates M4A in a stupid way.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-02 17:06:29+00:00
> such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao.

... Oh, come on now. I can't tell whether you're extremely confused about Sanders and Mamdani, or extremely confused about Stalin and Mao.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/25/bernie-sande... would have gone very differently if Sanders was Mao, for a start.
by druskacik | 2025-12-02 17:06:41+00:00
This is my experience as well. Mistral models may not be the best according to benchmarks and I don't use them for personal chats or coding, but for simple tasks with pre-defined scope (such as categorization, summarization, etc.) they are the option I choose. I use mistral-small with batch API and it's probably the best cost-efficient option out there.
by stopachka | 2025-12-02 17:06:43+00:00
Here's the full video:

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

The only time I spent outside of the video was to deploy to Vercel. I made a bunch of speedups in the video, but didn't cut anything. The total time was about 2 hours.

I mentioned it in the post, but there was definitely some hand holding towards the end, where I don't think a non-programmer would have succeeded
by array_key_first | 2025-12-02 17:06:54+00:00
Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.

And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.

An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.

Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.