MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-31 03:56:07+00:00
How we seem to be doing:

https://www.neatorama.com/2012/05/18/10-facts-you-might-not-...

Re boney quote, that's one heuristic for HN mods

TIL Mozilla would have done better channelling the Finnic fennec (Vs rebranding "pinko")
by ch1234 | 2025-12-31 03:56:33+00:00
How are these scores so vastly different between airlines?

I understand the water sources may vary (by airport? not sure?), but if the planes are largely manufactured by Boeing and Airbus, how are the onboard water sources / distribution systems getting contaminated?

Delta being a 5.00 means they're doing something different, but what is it & what control do they have over the plumbing, water systems, etc.?
by pama | 2025-12-31 03:56:43+00:00
Even killing all pathogens does not reduce all toxins already present in contaminated liquids. If you or others you know ever had (air) “traveller diarrhea”, you can try avoiding liquids in planes and see how it goes. The n95 masking and avoidance of drinks and food during flights opened the eyes of a lot of friends to this change. None of these pathogens in water are very serious strains to the body, whereas covid or flu are, so not as big a deal as avoiding yet another nasty airborne disease, but it all helps in small ways.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-31 03:58:00+00:00
I read your article. The rule of "Moving the stone only once" is profound.
It is the ultimate "Commitment," and it explains why Japanese walls survive earthquakes.

Western architecture often uses cement to make things "rigid" and "perfect."
But in Japan (an earthquake nation), rigid things snap and break.

Japanese stone walls (Ishigaki) have no cement. They are held together by balance and friction alone.
Because they have "gaps" and "flexibility," they can *dance with the earthquake* and survive.

We call this *"Asobi" (Play/Slack).*
Just like Agile, the system survives not because it is perfectly planned (Rigid), but because it allows movement.
Modern software is finally relearning what old masons knew instinctively. Great read.
by OGEnthusiast | 2025-12-31 04:00:02+00:00
> Only if you believe the 10% decline won't domino and that the S&P500 is secluded from the rest of the global economy. I wish I shared your optimism.

So your hypothesis is that a 10% decline in the S&P 500 will trigger the next Great Depression, i.e. years of negative GDP growth and unemployment? I agree that it could cause a slight economic slowdown, but I don't think AI and tech stocks are a large enough part of the economy to cause a Great Depression-style catastrophe.
by amkharg26 | 2025-12-31 04:03:24+00:00
This is a fantastic educational resource! Visual animations like these make understanding complex ML concepts so much more intuitive than just reading equations.

The neural network visualization is particularly well done - seeing the forward and backward passes in action helps build the right mental model. Would be great to see more visualizations covering transformer architectures and attention mechanisms, which are often harder to grasp.

For anyone building educational tools or internal documentation for ML teams, this approach of animated explanations is really effective for knowledge transfer.
by alexvd | 2025-12-31 04:03:36+00:00
The teens building with AI today will define how we use it tomorrow—so why do we push them to be consumers instead of creators?

At Hack Club I've reviewed thousands of projects teens built using AI coding tools. What stands out is how easy it is to tell whether someone used AI to complement their skills or replace them entirely.

Vibecoding produces a finished (albeit generic and unpolished) product way too early in the development cycle. Now, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are paying the price. They see AI as their cheat code. Relying on it to earn rewards without substantial work. At the moment, they're not learning AI fluency, they're learning AI convenience.

Schools cannot teach AI fluency. But the real world can and does. Making projects and getting user feedback is in my eyes the only way to teach the difference between vibecoded slop, and quality AI-assisted work.

At Hack Club, I'm helping lead this change.

We're teaching teens AI fluency by pushing them to build creative solutions that real people actually use. Because real end-users have standards that matter. Your CS teacher doesn't.

The way we develop solutions is changing. We have to acknowledge it.
by amkharg26 | 2025-12-31 04:04:14+00:00
Impressive performance gains! 5x faster than MuPDF is significant, especially for applications processing large volumes of PDFs. Zig's memory safety without garbage collection overhead makes it ideal for this kind of performance-critical work.

I'm curious about the trade-offs mentioned in the comments regarding Unicode handling. For document analysis pipelines (like extracting text from technical documentation or research papers), robust Unicode support is often critical.

Would be interesting to see benchmarks on different PDF types - academic papers with equations, scanned documents with OCR layers, and complex layouts with tables. Performance can vary wildly depending on the document structure.
by amkharg26 | 2025-12-31 04:04:52+00:00
PFAS contamination is one of those problems that seems insurmountable given how persistent these chemicals are. The fact that electrolysis can break down the carbon-fluorine bonds is genuinely exciting.

What's particularly interesting is the potential for on-site remediation. Traditional methods often involve excavating contaminated soil or pumping and treating groundwater indefinitely. If this can be scaled cost-effectively, it could transform cleanup efforts at industrial sites and military bases.

The key question is economic viability at scale. Energy costs for electrolysis can be significant, and PFAS contamination is often widespread. Would be curious to see lifecycle analysis comparing this to current remediation methods.
by amkharg26 | 2025-12-31 04:05:33+00:00
The comparison to railroad bubble economics is apt. OpenAI's infrastructure costs are astronomical - training runs, inference compute, and scaling to meet demand all burn through capital at an incredible rate.

What's interesting is the strategic positioning. They need to maintain leadership while somehow finding a sustainable business model. The API pricing already feels like it's in a race to the bottom as competition intensifies.

For startups building on top of LLM APIs, this should be a wake-up call about vendor lock-in risks. If OpenAI has to dramatically change their pricing or pivot their business model to survive, a lot of downstream products could be impacted. Diversifying across multiple model providers isn't just good engineering - it's business risk management.
by quuxplusone | 2025-12-31 04:06:07+00:00
I mean, "obviously" if you don't initialize your variables, they'll contain garbage. You can't assume that garbage is zero/false, or any other meaningful value.

But re the distinction at the end of TFA — that a garbage char is slightly more OK than a garbage bool — that's also intuitive. Eight bits of garbage is always going to be at least some valid char (physically speaking), whereas it's highly unlikely that eight bits of garbage will happen to form a valid bool (there being only two valid values for bool out of those 256 possible octets).

This also relates to the (old in GCC but super new in Clang, IIUC) compiler option -fstrict-bool.
by amkharg26 | 2025-12-31 04:06:23+00:00
The title is provocative but there's truth to it. The distinction between "vibing" with AI tools and actually controlling the output is crucial for production code.

I've seen this with code generation tools - developers who treat AI suggestions as magic often struggle when the output doesn't work or introduces subtle bugs. The professionals who succeed are those who understand what the AI is doing, validate the output rigorously, and maintain clear mental models of their system.

This becomes especially important for code quality and technical debt. If you're just accepting AI-generated code without understanding architectural implications, you're building a maintenance nightmare. Control means being able to reason about tradeoffs, not just getting something that "works" in the moment.
by umanwizard | 2025-12-31 04:06:37+00:00
Sure, it would be nice if TVs could have good sound out of the box if that meant no other tradeoffs. But if it means making the TV thicker (and, as other comments have pointed out, it probably would) then I'd be against it, since I never use the built-in TV speaker and frankly don't think anyone should.

Honestly I think high-end TVs should just not include speakers at all, similar to how high-end speakers don't contain built-in amplifiers. Then you could spend the money saved on whatever speakers you want.

> She shouldn't need to constantly adjust sound volume or settings, or spend another thousand on equipment and refurbishment to access to decent sound.

How about €100 on a soundbar?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-31 04:06:46+00:00
The last paragraph nails it:

"Between the two, Times New Roman may be the lesser evil: it is more widely recognized, and it doesn’t clash with the official context as overtly as Calibri does. Still, [...] [t]here was no need to dress up a political gesture with faux-erudite claims or to lavish praise on a mediocre typeface."

Times may not be great, but the choice of Calibri was one step away from Comic Sans.
by squarefoot | 2025-12-31 04:09:15+00:00
That crap should be turned off regardless of the material being watched. It's just rubbish put there to write in the advertising crazy, and completely bogus, contrast and resolution numbers, or to fake audio features that have no other reason to exist than putting one more bullet point when advertising that model. I wish signage displays were a bit cheaper because as of today they're the best possible less enshittified screens to watch stuff on.
by kawfey | 2025-12-31 04:11:34+00:00
Before reading the article, I guessed the headline was alluding to the popularity of Hypochlorus Acid as a sanitizer, made from electrolysis of slightly acidic salty (NaCl) water. I had a kid and the algorithm led me to discovering a brand of in-home electrolysis generators, and after a fair bit of research on safety and efficacy I’ve been using it quite a bit.

Technically it solves contamination problems too.
by godelski | 2025-12-31 04:11:39+00:00
> The “Shame on You” Award goes to the EPA for weak enforcement.

I had a laugh at this. Honestly, I'd love a world that the right wing is seeking with low regulation. The only problem is that these companies won't behave without regulatory bodies. So yeah, in a sense I agree with them that they are a waste of tax payer money. But the waste is from private industry. They're so unreliable we need a third party constantly checking them. The inefficiency of this third party is definitely an issue but the whole reason for their existence is that they willingly misbehave.

It makes me wonder, how much money is actually wasted by this? It also feels like violations should be the primary funding for these agencies. (Probably creates perverse incentives though)
by andrewflnr | 2025-12-31 04:12:41+00:00
> For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter.

Right, this is nonsense. Even if investors wanted to be complicit in fraud, it's an insane investment. "Give us money so we can survive the AI winter" is a pitch you might try with the government, but a profit-motivated investor will... probably not actually laugh in your face, but tell you they'll call you and laugh about you later.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-31 04:12:58+00:00
Right, and consider how many transformations happen to the data between the network call and the screen. In a modern app it's likely coming in as raw bytes, going through a JSON decoder (possibly with a detour through a native string type), likely getting marshaled into hash tables and arrays before being shoved into more specific model types, then pass that data along to a fully Unicode-aware text renderer that does high quality vector graphics.... There's a lot in there that could be incredibly slow. But since it's not, we can write a few lines of code to make all of this happen and not worry about optimization.
by pilingual | 2025-12-31 04:13:06+00:00
I wrote to hn@ and asked for this as a feature request:

"1. Delayed Karma Display. I understand why comment karma was hidden. I don't see the harm in un-hiding karma after some time. If not 24 hours, then 72-168 hours. This would help me read through threads with 1300 comments."

This was last January. While I asked for a few more features, it is the only one that seems essential as HN grows with massive threads.
by rixed | 2025-12-31 04:17:05+00:00
Those users will either check the source code and compile it themself, with all the proper options to match their system; or rely on a software distribution to do it for them.

People who are complaining would prefer a world of isolated apps downloaded from signed stores, but Linux was born at an optimistic time when the goal was software that cooperate and form a system, and which distribution does not depend on a central trusted platform.

I do not believe that there is any real technical issue discussed here, just drastically different goals.
by mootothemax | 2025-12-31 04:17:46+00:00
While I don’t disagree with you, for historical purposes I think it’s important to highlight why google started its push for 100% wire encryption everywhere all the time:

The NSA and GHCQ and basically every TLA with the ability to tap a fibre cable had figured out the gap in Google’s armour: Google’s datacenter backhaul links were unencrypted. Tap into them, and you get _everything_.

I’ve no idea whether Snowdon’s leaks were a revelation or a confirmation for google themselves; either way, it’s arguably a total breach.
by cdf | 2025-12-31 04:19:17+00:00
On paper, Google should never have allowed the ChatGPT moment to happen ; how did a then non-profit create what was basically a better search engine than Google?

Google suffers from classic Innovator's Dilemma and need competition to refocus on what ought to be basic survival instincts. What is worse is the search users are not the customers. The customers of Google Search are the advertisers and they will always prioritise the needs of the customers and squander their moats as soon as the threat is gone.
by qart | 2025-12-31 04:19:55+00:00
There is a talk called "Java for Small Coding Tasks" by the author of Core Java: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wFgshWMdA

Apparently, this is the way to do it:

///usr/bin/env java --source 25 "$0" "$@" ; exit $?

I don't do Java. As one comment on the video said, 'This presentation is the epitome of the old saying: "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"'
by mproud | 2025-12-31 04:20:44+00:00
Oh, the real Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) we certainly have a little rivalry and antipathy going on, but generally, very little. The other commenters here hinted at it: there are other towns and cities too. When people often say “the Twin Cities” they really mean the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, which is a seven-county, 3 million person region. There aren’t just two identities — there are several dozen identities — but they’re so small and nuanced that the distinction is often dropped or forgotten, or simplified (downtown vs. outside downtown, city vs. suburb, old vs. new developments, etc.)

Never heard of Minne-tucky before, but yeah, outstate or rural Minnesota would be that.
by supersonic339 | 2025-12-31 04:21:07+00:00
Hi everyone!

As a fellow user of existing usage monitors for Claude Code, I was looking for something simpler which didn’t require me to change views to look at my usage.

So I built a "simple usage monitor" that displays metrics directly in the last line of your terminal so you can continue using Claude without looking elsewhere.

simple-usage-monitor and Claude Code function independently of each other in the same terminal, so even if the overlay were to crash, your Claude session will remain uninterrupted.

You get:
Token counting
Cost counting (for supported models, including Opus 4.5)
Session reset timer
Number of messages sent
Plan based limits

Hope someone finds it useful!
by toast0 | 2025-12-31 04:21:09+00:00
A MITM can intercept the SYNs to port 80 and send their own SYN+ACK.

Not serving on port 80 means a passive viewer won't see any content, but if you were just serving a redirect, there's not much content to see.

IMHO, if you use HSTS preload and you prime HSTS by serving your favicon with https and HSTS, you can go ahead and serve your (unauthenticated) content with http. A modern browser will switch over to https; a MITM could fetch your https pages and return them over http; and you'll be accessible on ancient browsers that can't manage modern TLS.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-31 04:21:32+00:00
> Medicare tax is uncapped as of several years ago, I thought?

Yes, it is, but it's taxed far too low relative to its spending given the current healthcare cost structure. As a result, only half of the Medicare costs are funded by the Medicare Trust Fund, the other half is deficit funded.

In other words, unlike the Social Security tax, Medicare isn't self-funding from the Medicare tax because it's set artificially low (or healthcare costs are too high, if you prefer).
by lillecarl | 2025-12-31 04:22:48+00:00
> I like the idea of it, but Linux hardware support is still crap, and will get worse as ARM becomes more entrenched.
Linux arguably has better compatibility than Windows, but it's nuanced as it depends on what devices you're interested in.

> What boggles my mind is why Google hasn't gotten more serious about making Android a desktop OS.
Google is seriously working on making Android a desktop OS, Android 16 is only the first steps towards it.

> Yes there is the Chromebook, but ChromeOS is not a real desktop OS, it's a toy.
ChromeOS is very much not a toy, it's pretty great if it can facilitate your work.

> But then again that would require listening to customers and providing support, so nevermind
Google has consistently provided good support for all their hardware products, listening to customers is not their cup of tea though.

Google is absolutely no saint, I don't like their business model, how they're closing more and more of Android, how they keep killing services, how GCP can nuke AI nuke you, that they "own" web standards, ... But they're not all bad, they've also contributed greatly to much of the web and surrounding technologies.
by troyvit | 2025-12-31 04:23:47+00:00
It's like ya'll are so eager to crap on a thing that you don't even read tfa.

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services.

So you are assuming it's a rando's basement when they never said anything like that.

If their way of doing business is so offensive either don't use them, disrupt them or pitch in and help.

> I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look.

What does make a "good look" for a volunteer project?
by commonsense1947 | 2025-12-31 04:25:01+00:00
New York City is not just financial capital of the US but also the world.

San Francisco is not just technological capital of the US but also the world.

Inspite of that, NYC and SFO both with far less population cannot solve crime and human poop problem. But the scumbags expect India to solve all its problems in spite of massive population and loot and wars waged against India in the last 1000 years.
by golem14 | 2025-12-31 04:25:05+00:00
To quote George Carlin (careful, swearwords ahead):

When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River and it was filled with raw sewage okay? We swam in raw sewage! You know... to cool off! And at that time, the big fear was polio; thousands of kids died from polio every year but you know something? In my neighbourhood, no one ever got polio! No one! Ever! You know why? Cause we swam in raw sewage! It strengthened our immune systems! The polio never had a prayer; we were tempered in raw shit! So personally, I never take any special precautions against germs. I don't shy away from people that sneeze and cough, I don't wipe off the telephone, I don't cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it! Yes I do. Even if I'm at a sidewalk café! In Calcutta! The poor section! On New Year's morning during a soccer riot! And you know something? In spite of all that so-called risky behaviour, I never get infections, I don't get them, I don't get colds, I don't get flu, I don't get headaches, I don't get upset stomach, you know why? Cause I got a good strong immune system and it gets a lot of practice.
by kennethallen | 2025-12-31 04:25:22+00:00
Two big advantages:

You avoid an unnecessary copy. Normal read system call gets the data from disk hardware into the kernel page cache and then copies it into the buffer you provide in your process memory. With mmap, the page cache is mapped directly into your process memory, no copy.

All running processes share the mapped copy of the file.

There are a lot of downsides to mmap: you lose explicit error handling and fine-grained control of when exactly I/O happens. Consult the classic article on why sophisticated systems like DBMSs do not use mmap: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-12-31 04:26:16+00:00
I don't understand why governments haven't started to fund F-Droid, almost all govt. apps are open-source.

Countries which fear they could be cut off from the duopoly mobile ecosystem should be forcing android manufacturers to bundle in F-Droid; For the amount of nonsense regulations they force phone manufacturers to adhere to, bundling F-Droid wouldn't be that hard.

Google won't be happy, but anti-trust regulations would take care of it.
by Tcepsa | 2025-12-31 04:28:13+00:00
Also FWIW I understand that the furry community has a strong culture of commissioning artists for their work, so that's likely to be a headwind against using genAI that isn't explicitly trained only on licensed materials. Sure, there are likely some who would use it regardless, but I expect the use of genAI to generate furry porn to be at least as toxic within that community as the use of genAI to generate furry porn outside of that community.
by tao2024 | 2025-12-31 04:28:16+00:00
Hi HN,

We are a CS research team from UIUC. We just open-sourced LLMRouter, a unified library for LLM routing across different settings.

The motivation came from our own research and engineering work. Over the past year, we built and benchmarked multiple LLM routing systems, including GraphRouter (ICLR’25), Router-R1 (NeurIPS’25), and PersonalizedRouter (TMLR’25). What we consistently ran into was not an algorithmic issue, but an infrastructure one.

Today, most LLM routers come with custom input/output formats, training pipelines, and evaluation setups. This makes routers hard to reuse, hard to compare, and costly to integrate into real systems.

LLMRouter aims to standardize this layer. It provides:

Unified support for single-round, multi-round, agentic, and personalized routing

Implementations of 16+ state-of-the-art LLM routing algorithms

One-line commands to swap routers without rebuilding pipelines

Built-in benchmarking with extensible routers, tasks, and metrics

In practice, routing across a mix of large and small models using LLMRouter can reduce LLM API costs by roughly 30–50% while maintaining overall quality.

We hope LLMRouter can play a role similar to PyG for GNNs — a shared foundation that makes LLM routing research and deployment easier and more comparable.

GitHub: https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/LLMRouter

Project page: https://ulab-uiuc.github.io/LLMRouter/

Happy to answer questions or discuss design decisions.