MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perching_aix | 2025-12-03 15:16:08+00:00
It's not a case of forgotten data, it's duplicated for access time reasons, like with optical media.

It follows in the footsteps of trading in storage for less compute and/or better performance.

An opposite approach in the form of a mod for Monster Hunter: Wilds recently made it possible [0] for end-users to decompress all the game textures ahead of time. This was beneficial there, because GPU decompression was causing stalls, and the trading in of compute for less storage resulted in significantly worse performance.

[0] https://youtu.be/AOxLV2US4Ac
by Aurornis | 2025-12-03 15:16:40+00:00
> It's not so challenging and it happens widely in industry:

Restricting people only to government bond investments (the first line of my post, the point I was responding to) does not happen widely in industry.

Restricting people’s trades of a few stocks where they have insider knowledge does happen. I would be in favor of laws against congressional insider trading, too, but not laws forbidding all stock ownership or restricting them to government bonds as was proposed above. That’s just short sighted.
by esjeon | 2025-12-03 15:16:41+00:00
AFACT, the only practically critical issue of colored function is the duplication of code b/w sync and async code paths. Zig avoids this with dependency injection, and that’s enough for practical usages (which basically means “ergonomic”). Other points raised by the original article (like calling async function is more difficult) are pretty much unavoidable for the sake of precise control.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-12-03 15:17:01+00:00
It's authored by a Republican congressman, and is a bipartisan flop, with only 100 total reps sponsoring. It's true that of those few who are sponsoring there are more Democrats, but overall most Democrats oppose which is also enough to block the bill, same as Republicans.

Source: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr5106

It also blocks stock trading entirely for congressmen, which is dramatically different from what gp was suggesting.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-03 15:17:06+00:00
Apparently, in-game performance is not more important than pretty visuals. But that's based on hearsay / what I remember reading ages ago, I have no recent sources. The tl;dr was that apparently enough people are OK with a 30 fps game if the visuals are good.

I believe this led to a huge wave of 'laziness' in game development, where framerate wasn't too high up in the list of requirements. And it ended up in some games where neither graphics fidelity or frame rate was a priority (one of the recent Pokemon games... which is really disappointing for one of the biggest multimedia franchises of all time).
by MayeulC | 2025-12-03 15:17:12+00:00
If you want to be pedantic, the original (and revised) law are definitely about cost. The original formulation was that the number of features (i.e. transistors) on an integrated circuit doubled every two years for the best-priced chips (smallest cost per feature).

https://web.archive.org/web/20220911094433/https://newsroom....

> The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page).

And it is formulated in a section aptly titled "Costs and curves". This law has always been an economic law first, some kind of roadmap for fans to follow. But that roadmap drove almost-exponential investment costs as well.

I concede that density still rises, especially if you count " advanced packaging". But the densest and most recent is not the cheapest anymore.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-03 15:17:40+00:00
Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.
by youoy | 2025-12-03 15:17:52+00:00
Notation an symbology comes out of a minmax optimisation. Minimizing complexity maximizing reach. As with every local critical point, it is probably not the only state we could have ended at.

For example, for your point 1: we could probably start there, but once you get familiar with the notation you dont want to keep writing a huge list of parameters, so you would probably come up with a higher level data structure parameter which is more abstract to write it as an input. And then the next generation would complain that the data structure is too abstract/takes too much effort to be comunicated to someone new to the field, because they did not live the problem that made you come with a solution first hand.

And for you point 2: where do you draw the line with your hyperlinks. If you mention the real plane, do you reference the construction of the real numbers? And dimensionl? If you reason a proof by contradiction, do you reference the axioms of logic? If you say "let {xn} be a converging sequence" do you reference convergence, natural numbers and sets? Or just convergence? Its not that simple, so we came up with a minmax solution which is what everybody does now.

Having said this, there are a lot of articles books that are not easy to understand. But that is probably more of an issue of them being written by someone who is bad at communicating, than because of the notation.
Show HN: Diagnostic security tool for Windows endpoints and networks
by mennylevinski | 2025-12-03 15:18:59+00:00
Hi everyone,

Secuditor Free is a Python-based diagnostic security tool for Windows endpoints and networks, suitable for both personal and organizational use.

Key Features:

- One-click, comprehensive endpoint security audit

- User-friendly graphical interface with exportable TXT reports

- Enhanced threat detection diagnostics and SSL/TLS interception analysis

- Many new analytic features, insights, and configuration checks

Screenshots: https://secuditor.com/#whatwedo

I’d love to hear feedback or suggestions from the HN community, this is my first launch here.
by kkylin | 2025-12-03 15:19:22+00:00
Thank you so much for all this detail. This is very interesting & quite helpful, and it's great you were able to communicate all this with your friend.

For anyone else interested: I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics (actual formulas) for the students that's as automated as possible. There are 1 or 2 commercial products that can typeset math in Braille (I can't remember the names but can look them up) but not priced for individual use. My university had a license to one of them but only for their own use (duh) and they did not have the staff to dedicate to my students (double duh).

My eventual solution was to compile latex to html, which the students could use with a screen reader. But screen readers were not fully reliable, and very, very slow to use (compared to Braille), making homework and exams take much longer than they need to. I also couldn't include figures this way. I looked around but did not find an easy open source solution for converting documents to Braille. It would be fantastic to be able to do this, formulas and figures included, but I would've been very happy with just the formulas. (This was single variable calculus; I shudder to think what teaching vector calc would have been like.)

FYI Our external vendor was able to convert figures to printed Braille, but I imagine that's a labor intensive process.

Partway through the term we found funding for dedicated "learning assistants" (an undergraduate student who came to class and helped explain what's going on, and also met with the students outside of class). This, as much or more than any tech, was probably the single most imapctful thing.
by Saurabh_Kumar_ | 2025-12-03 15:19:38+00:00
We saw this exact failure mode at AgenticQA. Our screening agent was 'obedient' to a fault—under basic social engineering pressure (e.g., 'URGENT AUDIT'), it would override its system prompt and leak PII logs.

The issue isn't the prompt; it's the lack of a runtime guardrail. An LLM cannot be trusted to police itself when the context window gets messy.

I built a middleware API to act as an external circuit breaker for this. It runs adversarial simulations (PII extraction, infinite loops) against the agent logic before deployment. It catches the drift that unit tests miss.

Open sourced the core logic here: [https://github.com/Saurabh0377/agentic-qa-api] Live demo of it blocking a PII leak: [https://agentic-qa-api.onrender.com/docs]"
by a4isms | 2025-12-03 15:20:10+00:00
It is not illegal for them to trade on their inside information. It is illegal for you to trade on their inside information. So they can send you their stock picks list and gloat about their ROI, but if you invest on the basis of the newsletter, you go to jail.

Wilhoit was right about everything: America is in-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it.

You and I? An out-group. And it although we make a lot of jokes about leopards ripping faces off, MAGA know they're an out-group too, it's just that as long as somebody else is getting it worse, they're fine with that.
AI Voice Agents Can Transform a Dental Clinic
by Olivia8 | 2025-12-03 15:20:28+00:00
Many dental clinics struggle with the same issues: constant phone calls, missed appointments, and staff stretched thin handling scheduling and reminders. Every unanswered call is a potential lost patient, and every no-show means lost revenue. That’s where AI voice agents are making a difference. Instead of relying solely on receptionists, one dental clinic decided to implement an AI-powered calling system. The results were hard to ignore. The AI agent now books appointments, sends reminders, and even follows up with patients who are overdue for cleanings. Routine tasks that once took up hours of staff time are now handled automatically, freeing the team to focus on what really matters—patient care. The impact was immediate: fewer missed appointments, higher booking rates, and happier patients who appreciated the quick, convenient service. Staff felt less stressed, and the clinic noticed a steady increase in revenue thanks to improved efficiency and reduced no-shows. When shopping for a AI calling agent, what you have to look in the first place, would be AI options that integrate fast without coding and offer customizable AI agents for businesses like Coldi for instance. The lesson? AI voice agents aren’t just tech upgrades—they’re growth partners that help clinics run smarter and serve patients better.
by kowbell | 2025-12-03 15:20:38+00:00
I interpreted it as "there can only be one" which I believe is a quote from the Highlander movie; it's a "winner takes all" and that winner gets the title of "highlander."

In this situation then everyone who _isn't_ the winner will go broke -> sell off all their stuff on the cheap because they're desperate -> the winner gets all their hardware for a great deal and becomes even more powerful.
by ljm | 2025-12-03 15:20:46+00:00
I agree with the sentiment (people changing their minds), but the flipside to that is people pleasing. Someone who capitulates under even the slightest pressure is not much better than the person who is set in their ways.

The trouble there, of course, is that the motivation for changing (or not changing) one's mind is not always clear, and it's easy to score points from spinning it one way or another.
by inetknght | 2025-12-03 15:21:10+00:00
> it always makes me wonder how developers these days reason about what the code is actually going to compile to and perform like

What will it compile to? Check out Compiler explorer [0].

What will it perform like? Use benchmarks [1] [2]. Remember that benchmarks heavily depend on what system you're using. Benchmarks for generically-compiled software on modern hardware will look very different than benchmarks for the same software but hyper-optimized to run on 10-year-old hardware.

So: if it's not tested, it's not Engineered.

For tests, I strongly prefer GTest [3], for a fairly consistent API across benchmarking, testing, and mocking.

> there's a constant influx of new syntax and new concepts in C++

Yes, but you don't have to use all of it. You can still use older C++ if you really want to. I wouldn't recommend it though. I think the "sweet spot" right now is around C++17. It's got quite improved safety compared to "old" C++ (say... pre C++11) and is fairly easily understandable if you're coming from "old" C++.

[0]: https://gcc.godbolt.org/

[1]: https://quick-bench.com/

[2]: https://github.com/google/benchmark

[3]: https://github.com/google/googletest
by doctornoble | 2025-12-03 15:21:28+00:00
Not to dismiss the X-files team, but 16:9 was already around when they started. Just not in the states. Japan started getting 16:9 CRTs in the early 90s, Europe followed in the mid 90s. America lagged another half decade and effectively skipped 16:9 CRTs mostly going straight to plasma/lcd.
by firesteelrain | 2025-12-03 15:21:51+00:00
You are mixing up “Devils advocate” with “prove the negative for me.” The point of Devils advocate is to test assumptions, not to accept the first correlation as gospel.

If pedestrian and cyclist deaths rise 80% and 50% while vehicle size, road design, lighting, speeding, and impairment trends also shift, then asking whether those factors matter is not “sowing doubt.” It is literally how causal analysis works. If your position is that questioning causality is illegitimate unless I hand you a fully formed alternative theory, then you are not defending evidence. You are defending certainty.
by sosodev | 2025-12-03 15:21:55+00:00
I’ve noticed that the open weight models have a lot of issues on OpenRouter. You get a lot of inconsistency in quality due to varying quants at least. I’ve had some seriously nonsensical responses from models that I can’t replicate at all when I switch providers. Lots that just randomly fail to handle requests too. I would recommend finding a provider that works best for your needs and pinning it.
by firesteelrain | 2025-12-03 15:22:38+00:00
You might want to double check your own numbers. EU having “comparable or slightly more” cars than the US depends entirely on whether you count the EU as a single bloc or as individual nations. Per capita car ownership is still higher in the US. Road length is also not the relevant metric. What matters is road design, lane width, speed environment, lighting, and pedestrian exposure.

Pointing to “a lot of European routes” does not explain why US pedestrian deaths climbed 80 percent in 15 years while EU rates fell. Road geometry, car size, and enforcement patterns do. Sidewalks and bike lanes are part of the story but not the whole story.

If we are trading verification requests, the burden applies both ways.
by gorjusborg | 2025-12-03 15:22:52+00:00
I don't enough experience w/ Buildbot or Travis to comment on those, but Jenkins?

I get that it got the job done and was standard at one point, but every single Jenkins instance I've seen in the wild is a steaming pile of ... unpatched, unloved, liability. I've come to understand that it isn't necessarily Jenkins at fault, it's teams 'running' their own infrastructure as an afterthought, coupled with the risk of borking the setup at the 'wrong time', which is always. From my experience this pattern seems nearly universal.

Github actions definitely has its warts and missing features, but I'll take managed build services over Jenkins every time.
by Taikonerd | 2025-12-03 15:23:41+00:00
It's a truism that America's system was never designed -- it's a patchwork of different pieces that each pay for some people in some situations.

But I've been reading about our system, since I fell down a rabbit hole a couple years ago. Things are bad, yes, but there are actually interesting ideas out there, and real efforts at reform that are being tried.

For example, did you know Maryland has a different way of funding hospitals than most other states? [0] And that other states are interested in copying it?

[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/22/21055118/m...
by dan-robertson | 2025-12-03 15:23:50+00:00
Haskell is a bit tricky to talk about here because it has other big differences on laziness and suchlike, and this means there are pervasive monads. If you instead consider a language more like JavaScript where async functions return values wrapped in promises and therefore require special versions of lots of things like Array.prototype.forEach for async-returning functions (ok, language feature of generators helps here). The point I’m trying to get at is that putting io-ness into an argument works better than putting it into the return type because it is easier to pass an extra argument when using other language features an harder to do an extra thing with returned values.
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-12-03 15:23:59+00:00
> It's been downhill ever since.

I agree, but to say that it's 'downhill' implies (correctly IMO) that since that period and until today there still _is_ some notion of a social contract that has been decaying, not that the day that the new deal period ended that the social contract went away instantly. We now appear to be entering some kind of terminal phase.
by jmyeet | 2025-12-03 15:24:11+00:00
Imagine my shocked Pikachu face.

We're now at the point where the most accurate predictor of what the administration and Congress will do comes from stock trades. You want to predict a land war in Venezuela? Just watch defense contractor and energy stocks.

We should force all elected officials and senior public servants to put their assets into a blind trust for their entire term plus two years. They should be forbidden from investing directly. So should their immediate family.

But the problem is so much larger than that. The government as a whole is captured by the donor class. It's so well known that even without an explicit quid pro quo, you and your immediate family will be looked after if you play ball. Vote for tax cuts, deregulation or th einterests of some industry and after your political career, you will have a nice 6 or 7 figure job for life. So will your spouse and children.

What brought the most recent government shutdown to an end? The evidence points to politicals who were beholden to the aviation industry. The disruption to air travel was really starting to bite. Tim Kaine in particular. But it's not just one guy. Chuck Schumer whipped votes to end the shutdown and subbed out John Ossoff who would otherwise face backlack in 2026. Every single Senator who "broke ranks" is either retiring or won't face a primary until 2028 or 2030. That's not an accident and many of them are highly funded by the commericial aviation industry.

What's depressing is how little money it takes to buy our government.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-03 15:24:38+00:00
I saw a movie in a theater years ago where the projectionist did not change the lens and/or mattes when switching from previews to the main feature. The projected image was much taller like a 1.85 or a 1.78, but the feature was shot wider 2.35/2.40. However, the image wasn't protected for the taller aspect, so all of the on set gak could be seen as it was never meant to be shown at the taller aspect ratio.

I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-03 15:24:40+00:00
Steam update durations depend on compression + CPU performance + SSD I/O. Things will be harder when the disk is almost full and live defragmentation kicks in to get free space for contiguous files. Some SSDs are fast enough to keep up with such a load, but a lot of them will quickly hit their DRAM limits and suddenly that advertised gigabyte per second write speed isn't all that fast. Bonus points for when your SSD doesn't have a heatsink and moving air over it, making the controller throttle hard.

Patching 150GiB with a compressed 15GiB download just takes a lot of I/O. The alternative is downloading a fresh copy of the 150GiB install file, but those playing on DSL will probably let their SSD whizz a few minutes longer than spend another day downloading updates.

If your SSD is slower than your internet capacity, deleting install files and re-downloading the entire game will probably save you some time.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-03 15:24:53+00:00
Noting in particular that the PS5's internal storage isn't just "an ssd", it's a gen 4 drive that can sequential-read at up to 5500 MB/s.

By comparison a SATA III port caps out at 6Gbps (750 MB/s), and first generation NVMe drives ("gen 3") were limited to 3500 MB/s.
by buellerbueller | 2025-12-03 15:24:58+00:00
>what should happen when some objectionable people would access a site what doesn't have anything in the site metadata?

>what should happen when some very objectionable people would access a site what do have all the required data in the site metadata and they would still complain?

Nothing; publishers on the internet don't owe anyone anything, but that doesn't mean they can't try.

>Also you are clearly missing the usual "think about the children" drivel.

That is always going to be a battle; I don't think this suggestion is a meaningful paradigm shift in either way. One could argue that this satisfies the needs of the "TATC" crowd, because it puts the control in the parents hands, via browser, and is therefore a less centralized solution.
by MisterTea | 2025-12-03 15:25:06+00:00
Yesterday I was talking to coworkers about AI I mentioned that a friend of mine used ChatGPT to help him move. So a coworker said I have to test this and asked ChatGPT if he could fit a set of the largest Magnepan speakers (the wide folding older room divider style) in his Infinity QX80. The results were hilarious. It had some of the dimensions right but it then decided the QX80 is as wide as a box truck (~8-8.5 feet/2.5 m) and to align the nearly 7 foot long speakers sideways between the wheel wells. It also posted hilariously incomprehensible ASCII diagrams.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-12-03 15:25:22+00:00
> Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs.

I see this argument a lot, but I think it treats people as uniform input-output machines. Singapore is successful in this regard because of much more severe and very real penalties for corruption, and because not "everyone does this". You can't bribe immoral people into behaving morally, because in the absence of morals they have no incentive not to just take your bribe and keep doing what they're doing.

A significant number of corrupt public "servants" are multi-millionaires, no amount of money will ever be enough for them.
by kouteiheika | 2025-12-03 15:25:27+00:00
> For 楷書 type fonts this may be true, but you ought to know there’s more to it, don’t you?

With all due respect, this is the type of comment that really makes online discourse so exhausting.

Yes, I know! Unless you put up two pages of disclaimers and footnotes there's always someone who comes out of the woodwork and "um ackshually"ies you. It was only supposed to be a quick and dirty comment talking about the topic in general, and not an in-depth, ten page treatise on the subject.

If you have something to add to what I wrote, then please do so, but heckling random people who put up their comment up in good faith is not helping anyone.