MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-15 17:57:24+00:00
Parent says consume, you write use.

I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?

It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-12-15 17:57:37+00:00
I think I understand a desire for "calm" learning. I'm not especially interested in learning a language right now. However, I do generally have a distaste for "gamified" learning, and, separately, I feel distracted by things I feel are not very fulfilling, but are addicting (namely, scrolling through news, social media, or videos on my phone).

I won't say what you are building is a mistake. But just based on what you described, if I were interested in learning a language through your app, I would not just be comparing it to other language learning apps, but I would also be comparing it to language textbooks/workbooks, classes at a community college or MOOC, or language courses on DVD/CD/YouTube/etc. I guess I think that apps are good at gamifying things, if that were to be a goal. If you are stripping that away, what makes your app unique compared to all those other resources? How does your app replace or supplement other things?

And to be clear, I imagine there could be plenty of things that make your app unique! I just would want to know what those things are before diving in.
by Kase1111 | 2025-12-15 17:57:59+00:00
I've been thinking about the persistent opacity and accessibility problems in blockchain ledgers. Traditional blockchains store canonical data as symbolic structures (hashes, JSON, binary transactions, or code)—human intent only appears indirectly, requiring translation layers that introduce semantic loss, audit friction, and barriers for non-technical users. What if we flipped this: a distributed ledger where the primary, immutable entries are natural language prose—full narrative statements forming a shared, tamper-proof "book" of events? Example entry: "On December 15, 2025, Alice transferred 500 units to Bob in exchange for consulting services completed on December 10, 2025. Both parties confirm mutual agreement." The chain preserves continuous discourse as ground truth. LLMs handle interpretation, ambiguity resolution, validation, and consensus (e.g., nodes negotiate/confirm intent linguistically). Cryptography secures hashes of the prose; execution rules can be expressed and enforced in language. This isn't:

A natural language interface or query tool on top of symbolic data (plenty of those exist). Hybrid "smart legal contracts" where prose is just attached to executable code (code remains canonical). Generating code from text (common in LLM-blockchain integrations).

Here, natural language is the substrate—no translation boundary between human meaning and machine enforcement. Potential upsides:

Ledgers readable like a story (huge for personal finance: taxes/bills as lifelong narrative, no doom-scrolling statements). Inherent auditability and dispute resolution (query the shared discourse). Better fit for AI agent economies (agents negotiate/append via conversation). Reduced semantic drift in governance/contracts.

Challenges obvious: ambiguity handling, storage overhead, security against adversarial phrasing—but LLMs are getting remarkably good at contextual reasoning. Posting this as prior art/repo to establish the concept openly (CC BY-SA licensed). No implementation yet, but curious what the HN crowd thinks—feasible? Useful? Already explored somewhere I missed? Repo: https://github.com/kase1111-hash/NatLangChain
by lelanthran | 2025-12-15 17:58:11+00:00
> I'm not a frontend guy, I'm an operations guy that sometimes does some backends. So it's likely a solid 2.5 days for me to build the pair of these, probably more I haven't touched Javascript in over a decade.

Right, understood and agreed, but this was not about you and your specific skills or lack thereof; your anecdote was in support of an argument that companies would stop their SaaS because LLMs enable them to build in house.

That was your argument, right?

So in the absence of LLMs, if the company wanted to stop paying for the SaaS, would they have chosen you to do the replacement, or someone who had recent experience in the tech?

Look, we are interested in comparing the time taken to replace the SaaS with an LLM, and the time taken to replace the SaaS without LLM assistance.

That's really the only two scenarios under discussion, so lets explore those exhaustively:

1. Without LLMs: In the worst case scenario, the company had to pay for 2.5 days of employee time with the best case being 1 day of employee time. Lets go with something in-between like 1.5 days of dev time.

2. With LLMs: The company pays for 0.5 days of employee time (includes the overhead of token cost/subscription).

The difference between the only two scenarios that we have is literally a single day of employee costs!

I am skeptical that the company failed to leave the SaaS earlier because they didn't want to eat the cost of a 1.5 paid days for an employee, but a difference of a single day of cost was enough to tip the scales.
by xbmcuser | 2025-12-15 17:58:22+00:00
"Most of it is a lie that they tell their own citizens, though, as America and the West only want democracy and promote it for their own ends. They destroy any democracy that might not align with their worldview or serve their interests.

The current administration is overtly doing what was previously done covertly. Dictators are acceptable as long as it is politically convenient. One of the most recent cases is Pakistan, where the army has taken over, and EU and Commonwealth election monitors did not issue even election monitor report even after two years. Instead, they have facilitated the murder and killing of Pakistani civilians. But maybe Pakistanis are brown-skinned, so for them, democracy is not allowed.

Pakistan should be under sanctions, but it is not, as it is providing ammunition for Ukraine. That is the biggest problem of the West: their hypocrisy. They are calling for democracy in Hong Kong, as that serves their own agendas, but will say nothing about an apartheid state like Israel."

"Imran Khan, the former prime minister, has been jailed without trial for the last two-plus years and has been kept in solitary confinement for months out of those. How many newspapers mention it in the West or make it a news topic? But this Hong Kong (HK) Jimmy Lai conviction will be the headlines in most of the Western media a clear example of propaganda to rile up the population against China and socialism.

This is why I laugh when people here on Hacker News mention China's control of media and its propaganda, when the Western media is no better than them. At least many Chinese citizens know they are being propagandized against and can filter it out."
by stuffn | 2025-12-15 17:58:32+00:00
Chevron Deference is used to bypass congressional and court scrutiny. I'm getting downvoted, particularly, because I do not believe people understand the extent of what Chevron Deference provides. I am not surprised. It's not mentioned often, it's often editorialized particularly by leftist media as a great boon to our society, and most people are unaffected by it.

Congress is expected to make laws. End of story. Chevron Deference allows them to reduce their own liability and burden by rubberstamping opinion into law. That is a tremendous problem. Congress' core directive is to protect our rights. Not restrict them. Industry plants have a much easier time infesting regulatory bodies through revolving door policies, regulatory bodies change with every administration, and regulatory bodies are not held to a standard of rigor that approaches 1/10th of the worst quality scientific journal. That is a major problem. The first thing any true tactical politician will do is move his or her favorite industry plants into regulatory bodies. Then, they can give "opinion" that aligns with the view of that person, which is then rubberstamped into law.

If we cannot expect congress to do their job our government has failed it's absolute simplest purpose. There are then much greater problems than whether turtles are choking on can holders.
by wk_end | 2025-12-15 17:58:37+00:00
No, I'm not. Really frustrating to have to explain this repeatedly.

While ethnic cleansing undoubtedly occurred, it wasn't the original intent "at the core" of the Zionist project. Rather, the intent at the core of the project was - precisely as always stated - desire for Jewish self-determination, and (once again) they initially set out to attain that through peaceful and legal means and were happy to accept an internationally supported solution that did not involve ethnic cleansing.

I'm really not sure how to make this clearer: there was an entirely workable plan that would have gotten the Zionists what they wanted without ethnic cleansing, they accepted it, no further violence needed to occur. The proof is in the pudding: if ethnic cleansing was core to the project, such a plan could not have existed and/or the Zionists would not have accepted it.

Instead, the Arabs refused this, had zero interest in trying to negotiate any kind of peaceful solution, began to ethnically cleanse Jews throughout the Arab world [0], and launched an international war effort to subjugate or oust the Jews from the region.

The Israeli defense and retaliation ultimately included ethnic cleansing of its own. That's undeniable. But even here it wasn't core to the project; it wasn't a war goal at the beginning. Per Wikipedia [1]:

Initially, the aim was "simple and modest": to survive the assaults of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. "The Zionist leaders deeply, genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern reenactment of the Holocaust, which had just ended; the Arabs' public rhetoric reinforced these fears". As the war progressed, the aim of expanding the Jewish state beyond the UN partition borders appeared: first to incorporate clusters of isolated Jewish settlements and later to add more territories to the state and give it defensible borders. A third and further aim that emerged among the political and military leaders after four or five months was to "reduce the size of Israel's prospective large and hostile Arab minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency and expulsion".

It's tragic that they arrived at that "third and further aim"; I'm looking back on this with 80 years of both distance and hindsight, but I can at least conceive of a world in which they didn't.

I don't mean to whitewash what the Israelis did in the war - any more than Palestinian supporters want to whitewash what the Arabs did and intended to do, I suppose. But I was replying to someone asserting that the State of Israel simply could not exist without ethnic cleansing, that to be a Zionist fundamentally means to support ethnic cleansing. This is what I'm disputing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...
by seg_lol | 2025-12-15 17:58:44+00:00
> Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling.

If these data centers are so water efficient, please explain the Dalles data center use > 25% of their water supply?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230130142801/https://centralor...

https://web.archive.org/web/20251014013855/https://www.orego...
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-15 17:58:50+00:00
> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature

And a plain reading of the Basic Law (Hong Kong's constitution) permits everything that's happened, and expecting the contrary seems like a coping mechanism. There are massive exemptions for Hong Kong's autonomy and deferrence to Beijing at Beijing's discretion, or by the Head of Hong Kong who is appointed by Beijing

I wasn't around for the handover so I'm largely exempt from the emotional marriage to an ideal Hong Kong residents and people affirming Hong Kong resident's feelings seem to have

The legislature wouldn't have to be consulted for the National Security Law to have been enacted, the article and seemingly all of the west seems to think that is a controversy when it isn't necessary

And then there is another layer where the structure of the legislature doesn't even match western ideals and wouldn't have made a difference. The legislature is 50% popular vote and 50% corporations. So even if 100% of the population voted for the same thing, they would only have 50% of the vote, and the corporations are all pro-Beijing by nature of being able to economically exist in that environment.

(Notably, the ancient City of London within London functions nearly the same way. Actually in an even more egregious way with the non-natural persons having a more extreme weighting of votes)

People act like a different founding document governs Hong Kong (Sino British joint declaration? Some comments by representatives), when it doesn't. People act like the governing document of Hong Kong was supposed to be ignored for 50 years, when something way different and way more integrated is supposed to happen at the end of the handover period.

I think there is zero path to the goals Hong Kong residents espouse and are used to. They’re imagining a different governing system than the one they live in, thats incompatible.
by username223 | 2025-12-15 17:59:11+00:00
It depends upon what you're trying to accomplish, and for whom. Are you trying to make money from casual language dabblers? Create a useful resource for people whose livelihoods depend upon learning a language? Teach yourself?

I tried learning a language via Duolingo for a while. I treated it as "free flash cards with pronunciation," and tried to ignore the gamification and cutesy animated characters. I ditched it when it went all-in on AI slop. I've since found a free 1990s-style website that has common phrases, conjugation rules, etc. with pronunciation, and have learned much more.
by the_af | 2025-12-15 17:59:26+00:00
I think if it's coincidental, it cannot be fair right? Fair in the sense we're discussing here must mean a repeatable system. If a wrongful process arrives at the right conclusion, it's still not fair (e.g. let's say a bunch of people lynch someone accused of murdering a child, without hearing any evidence, and it turns out the suspect was really a child mudered: was the process "fair"?).

Or if you don't like the child murder analogy: suppose an FBI employee decided to betray the US to the Soviets out of money, not ideology (cue Robert Hanssen). The US is at this point in time still executing traitors to the state. They grab this Hanssen-type, send him to the electric chair (on faulty evidence or simply "vibes" of guilt), but later it turns out this person was really guilty. Was this process fair?

Maybe Sweden if relatively fairer, like you said. I suspect not. But even if it was relatively fair, what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
by seemaze | 2025-12-15 17:59:33+00:00
I've used finnix forever as my go to live recovery distro, and have never heard of knoppix.

From a cursory search, it appears that finnix is focused on the command line while knoppix provides a desktop environment. Don't most distros offer live boot environments these days? I know I've done this with Fedora, Debian, Suse, and Alpine at least..
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-12-15 17:59:56+00:00
Maybe these researchers and experts should show up and present their suggested positions. People are tired of ivory tower proclamations, and most fundamentally, you need to reach people where they're at. That's just the kind of information ecosystem that we're living in, so people need to adapt.

Unfortunately, ignoring the public sphere and pretending that professionals are above such things is why we're now stuck with someone like Robert Kennedy Jr running HHS. This guy grew enough of a following and movement to reach a position of power and influence and he was barely challenged by experts all along the way.
by philipallstar | 2025-12-15 17:59:59+00:00
> Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three).

It's also possible to belong to a union that's bad for customers as well, as they entrench the status quo or raise prices by blocking automation.

Or to ones that donate against your politics[0], which seems particularly galling.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-pour...
by wtallis | 2025-12-15 18:00:04+00:00
Are you sure? I've seen plenty of motherboards bundle a PCIe riser to passively bifurcate the PCIe slot to support four M.2 drives in an x16 slot or two in an x8 slot, but doing eight M.2 drives in one PCIe slot would either require a PCIe switch that would be too expensive for a free bundled card, or require PCIe bifurcation down to two lanes per link, which I don't think any workstation CPUs have ever supported. And 32TB is possible with just four M.2 SSDs.
by pjdesno | 2025-12-15 18:00:04+00:00
The storage markets I can think of, off the top of my head: 1. individual computers 2. hobbyist NAS, which may cross over at the high end into the pro audio/video market 3. cloud 4. enterprise

#1 is all NVMe. It's dominated by laptops, and desktops (which are still 30% or so of shipments) are probably at the high end of the performance range.

#2 isn't a big market, and takes what they can get. Like #3, most of them can just plug in SAS drives instead of SATA.

#3 - there's an enterprise market for capacity drives with a lower per-device cost overhead than NVMe - it's surprisingly expensive to build a box that will hold dozens of NVMe drives - but SAS is twice as fast as SATA, and you can re-use the adapters and mechanicals that you're already using for SATA. (pretty much every non-motherboard SATA adapter is SAS/SATA already, and has been that way for a decade)

#4 - cloud uses capacity HDDs and both performance and capacity NVMe. They probably buy >50% of the HDD capacity sold today; I'm not sure what share of the SSD market they buy. The vendors produce whatever the big cloud providers want; I assume this announcement means SATA SSDs aren't on their list.

I would guess that SATA will stay on the market for a long time in two forms: - crap SSDs, for the die-hards on HN and other places :-) - HDDs, because they don't need the higher SAS transfer rate for the foreseeable future, and for the drive vendor it's probably just a different firmware load on the same silicon.
by everdrive | 2025-12-15 18:00:22+00:00
>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.

This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
Show HN: Mukbang 3D – Turn short food videos into interactive 3D models
by mnorris | 2025-12-15 18:00:26+00:00
Record a short video of food, it gets reconstructed into a 3D model using photogrammetry. Viewers can spin and zoom the model while the original video plays behind it.

Pose tracking lets me project 3d effects onto the video like the glow in the demo.
by hashmap | 2025-12-15 18:00:29+00:00
I do like the look of this! It seems like it nicely provides that without like kicking you into React, which I have ended up having to draw a hard line against in development after my first couple experiences not only with it, but how the distributions in AI models make it a real trap to touch. I'll swap this in in one of my projects and give it a go. Thanks!
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-12-15 18:00:54+00:00
It's not our aspirations that we've lost.

It's the entrenchment of a particular kind of parasitic elite.

The logic that made them into "elites" has turned in on itself and is now self-cannibalizing.

The saving grace is only the capacity for the American people to see through this, but with the derangement of information pathways we're increasingly at the behest of these people and their narratives that only serve their aggrandizement.

All the talk about "saving the west" or "individualism" or the some other talk of spirit that these preachers sermon about, is only to serve themselves and no one else.

"Calling out evil" is another one of those victims to their self-serving motivations. Along with "climate change", "environmentalism", "democracy", "freedom", or a whole host of otherwise genuinely noble causes.
by wrs | 2025-12-15 18:01:17+00:00
You're not wrong, but I just wanted to point out that this level of arbitrary executive behavior and blatant massive government corruption is pretty new to us (the many millions of decent US citizens who are appalled at it), and we're still trying to figure out what the heck we can do about it. So at least for now I really hope it's valid to ascribe this just to the current administration, not assume the US will stay like this.
Show HN: Stoker – Realtime internal tools with offline support
by bigjimhere | 2025-12-15 18:01:18+00:00
Stoker began 12 years ago while I was building custom web apps for field service companies. Over time, I developed a framework that helped me deliver customisations faster. Three years ago, I started rebuilding that framework from the ground up.

Stoker takes a config-first approach, similar to Payload, and is essentially a headless CMS with an Admin UI. The front end is built with React, while the back end runs on Firebase, providing realtime updates and offline support.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.
by api | 2025-12-15 18:01:19+00:00
When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?

If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?

The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.

Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
by ekunazanu | 2025-12-15 18:01:23+00:00
> Agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Pretty much. They are only as effective as the body trying to enforce it. The entire point of being a sovereign nation is nobody can force you to do anything. Now it is in a nation's self interest to not violate agreements and get along nicely, but sometimes the calculus changes and the punishment may not outweigh the benefits.
by integralid | 2025-12-15 18:01:36+00:00
My favourite - by a large margin - language learning app is Anki. This is an open source flashcards app, with minimalistic (one could say primitive) UI and no gamification whatsoever[1].

So yes, I see value in programs like this.

[1] to be fair, my STEM brain enjoys looking at my review statistics and charts. But they are non-intrusive and one has to actively look for them, so it's nowhere near gamification.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-15 18:01:58+00:00
If I were to bet on my hunches: At least half, leaning more, of that 20% buying SATA SSDs is probably momentum of people who didn't know they could get a better performing m.2 NVMe drive for the same price. Few people are upgrading PCs with SSDs for the first time in 2025 and those that are probably didn't really need SATA, they just searched for SATA/saw SATA.

I don't really know how one would get numbers for any of the above one way or the other though.