MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-12 07:10:27+00:00
It’s so weird people are talking about immorality being bad without discussing the affect on child rearing and family structure.

Are we going to be fertile our entire lives? Interesting the topic doesn’t come up much. But let’s say we are.

My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (etc) are still alive and producing more siblings, aunts/uncles, etc.

The phrase aunt/uncle would no longer have age implications. In terms of caregiving, my wife, mom, and grandmother might all be pregnant and raising kids at the same time.

In practice, the family tree would be flattened.

Organizations would have similar issues. I’d have to compete against developers with 500 years experience. Even with respecialization, some skills transfer.

If Shakespeare were still alive would we have an Oscar Wilde? Would it matter, since Homer is around too?

In that regard, what language would we be speaking? There are quite a few Ancient Greek speakers still kicking I guess. But Enheduanna is still here too, chanting her Babylonian Hymns to Inana on the synth I guess.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-12 07:11:15+00:00
WSL2, Neovim, LSPs, Brave Browser, fzf, yt-dlp - just the ones I've used today.

>>makefiles

They are hard to debug and I never could make the compilation as fast as with CMake (which sucks for many other reasons). Hopefully Zig build system will make both obsolete in the near future.
by mikestorrent | 2025-12-12 07:13:00+00:00
So true! There will come a point at which there'll be two internets: the walled garden that only lets you in with Secure Attestation, Web Credentials for your verified age-of-maturity, etc. on a non-rooted device... and then the cyberpunk web where people running their own unofficial gear will be.

I wonder if one could do Anti-Secure-Attestation, like, only allow connections from rooted devices? Back to proving root by running a service on the good old sub-1024 ports?
by anotherpaul | 2025-12-12 07:13:07+00:00
While the paper is behind a pay wall, the abstract highlights that they used knock out gene editing, meaning this is not a GMO of the old days, with trans genes, but a mkdifcation one could have achieved with classical breeding if given enough time and resources.

If I understand this right, this would even in the EU now be allowed to be sold without the GMO label.
by gspr | 2025-12-12 07:14:33+00:00
Here's what I don't get: why can't we have a modern one? It doesn't need to blow flagship smartphones out of the water. It doesn't even need to have a GSM baseband – I'd rather just connect through my "normal" smartphone than deal with all the complications of having a whole extra computer in there.

Surely this is getting close to realizable by hobbyists or a niche company?
by palata | 2025-12-12 07:15:10+00:00
I don't mind the celebration and ceremony as long as they don't bother me personally. I wouldn't fight against the existance of a PatternConf, I just wouldn't go :-).

I've had some debates with junior devs who really wanted to enforce their newly-learned patterns, and my experience there is that passed a certain point, there is no convincing anymore: if they really insist about overengineering something with their newly-learned concept and the hierarchy doesn't allow me to prevent them from doing it, anyway they will do it. So instead of fighting I just let them, and if it turns out to be a waste of time in the end... well that's not my problem: I was not in a position to prevent it in the first place.

It's not only patterns though: some juniors have a way to try to use every exciting framework or library or tool they just discovered.
by russelldjimmy | 2025-12-12 07:15:13+00:00
Thanks for the vulnerability and full marks for self awareness.

> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.

This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
by llbeansandrice | 2025-12-12 07:16:27+00:00
This isn’t strictly directed at you, but I’m saddened that HN is immediately ready to dream big when it comes to solving hard problems and making the world a better place in spaces like AI, crypto, and technology in general. But suddenly shuts down over things as simple as trains, buses, and bike lanes.

There’s plenty of examples of guerrilla urbanism that I think align closely to the hacker ethos. Even more these problems are very solvable and can net huge gains in metrics without having to “dream for a century”.

> waaaaay more rail routes

It’s actually much simpler, Amtrak just needs right of way along with some other straight forward regulations to help balance freight and transit on America’s railroads.

Amtrak has also been doing great at incremental expansion and brining back (or increasing!) ridership just in the 5 years since the pandemic in a number of areas like Chicago to Milwaukee, and in the PNW.

The defeatist attitude isn’t what I expect from HN. You already found the best piece of actionable advice which is to look for incremental ways you can adjust your life to be different. My wife and I hardly drive anymore. Most of our trips: her work, groceries, restaurants, most leisure activities, etc are now by bike. We live in the suburbs too, a full 10 miles (20-30min drive and across an interstate) from the city’s downtown.

Cars are only perceived as necessary in America bc it is assumed that they are. There are many small and safe ways to shed the car dependence and they’ve all been huge positives to my life. We’re happier, healthier, building more community, spending less money on gas and maintenance. It’s nice.
by dkam | 2025-12-12 07:16:53+00:00
Love the progress being made here. I've been really enjoying learning about another embedded database - DuckDB - the OLAP to SQLite's OLTP.

DuckDB has a lakehouse extension called "DuckLake" which generates "snapshots" for every transaction and lets you "time travel" through your database. Feels kind of analogous to LiteStream VFS PITR - but it's fascinating to see the nomenclature used for similar features. The OLTP world calls it Point In Time Recovery, while in the OLAP/data lake world, they call it Time Travel and it feels like a first-class feature.

In SQLite Litestream VFS, you use `PRAGMA litestream_time = ‘5 minutes ago’` ( or a timestamp ) - and in DuckLake, you use `SELECT * FROM tbl AT (VERSION => 3);` ( or a time stamp ).

DuckDB (unlike SQLite) doesn't allow other processes to read while one process is writing to the same file - all processes get locked out during writes. DuckLake solves this by using an external catalog database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite) to coordinate concurrent access across multiple processes, while storing the actual data as Parquet files. It's a clever architecture for "multiplayer DuckDB.” - deliciously dependent on an OLTP to manage their distributed multiple user OLAP. Delta Lake uses uploaded JSON files to manage the metadata skipping the OLTP.

Another interesting comparison is the Parquet files used in the OLAP world - they’re immutable, column oriented and contain summaries of the content in the footers. LTX seems analogous - they’re immutable, stored on shared storage s3, allowing multiple database readers. No doubt they’re row oriented, being from the OLTP world.

Parquet files (in DuckLake) can be "merged" together - with DuckLake tracking this in its PostgreSQL/SQLite catalog - and in SQLite Litestream, the LTX files get “compacted” by the Litestream daemon, and read by the LitestreamVFS client. They both use range requests on s3 to retrieve the headers so they can efficiently download only the needed pages.

Both worlds are converging on immutable files hosted on shared storage + metadata + compaction for handling versioned data.

I'd love to see more cross-pollination between these projects!
by baq | 2025-12-12 07:17:25+00:00
It definitely isn’t voodoo, it’s more like forecasting weather. Some forecasts are easier to make, some are harder (it’ll be cold when it’s winter vs the exact location and wind speed of a tornado for an extreme example). The difference is you can try to mix things up in the prompt to maximize the likelihood of getting what you want out and there are feasibility thresholds for use cases, e.g. if you get a good answer 95% of the time it’s qualitatively different than 55%.
by kmoser | 2025-12-12 07:18:36+00:00
Not true; kids too young to understand porn can stumble across it, or find it because they searched for it simply because they heard about it from their friends. I'm not saying they'll be harmed by it (most of them won't be), but there will always be a small percentage of people who find a certain thing and then go on to get harmed by that thing. That doesn't mean the rest of us should have to jump through hoops to responsibly use that thing.
by kazinator | 2025-12-12 07:19:08+00:00
I enjoy the utter lack of these concerns in Japanese typesetting. Hyphenation is not a concept. Anything can be wrapped to the next line, including punctuation marks.

I was once reading a paperback novel in which one chapter ended on an almost entirely blank page with just one character that didn't fit into the previous page. That character was 。(the Japanese sentence-ending period).

It can happen that matters that people in one culture punctiliously obsess about don't mean a thing in another culture.
by baobun | 2025-12-12 07:20:11+00:00
One thing to keep in mind when reading about any "ZKP protocol" is that on its own the term has the same inherent vagueness as "end-to-end encrypted" - especially when like here there are more than two parties concerned to solve a single verification.

What information is not disclosed to whom? In what way is it ZK?

One example is Googles "zero-knowledge age verification" where AFAICT, Google still has full insight into all the sensitive data and metadata. It's not like they inherently need to be the designated middleman but that is how the scheme is designed. Therefore I find it ingeniously marketed. A bit like saying "Facebook Messenger protects all your messages with end-to-end encryption", which is arguably technically true but misleading and not an honest statement.
by sergdigon | 2025-12-12 07:20:32+00:00
The fact that the post is comparing their reasoning model against gemini 3 pro (the "non reasoning" model) and not gemini 3 pro deep think (the reasoning one) is quite nasty. If you compare GPT5.2 thinking to gemini 3 pro deep think, the scores are quite similar (sometimes one is better sometimes the other one is)
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-12 07:21:12+00:00
Contractors defend this by pointing out that service members tend to retire and get jobs at competing firms.

The problem is they’re saying “we don’t trust the military with our secrets.”

I’ve seen this attitude at many firms. Keep things so secret even the clients/regulators don’t know what’s going on.

There’s a huge cultural lack of openness, which strongly contrasts with our history of free inquiry.
by mykowebhn | 2025-12-12 07:23:42+00:00
A couple of Youtubers who are also round-the-world travelers whom I enjoy watching, one a Dutch motorcyclist and the other a German cyclist.

Noraly, the motorcyclist, has already traveled through South and North America, Africa, and Asia, some multiple times. Currently, I believe she is in Tajikistan about to enter Kyrgystan.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEIs9nkveW9WmYtsOcJBwTg

Max Roving, the cyclist, has already cycled through Afghanistan and he is currently trying to ride Africa north to south. He just completed Algeria and is about to enter Morroco.

https://www.youtube.com/@MaxRoving
by llbeansandrice | 2025-12-12 07:24:01+00:00
I actually see this as a benefit! Cars take up a lot of space and so now there exists massive right of ways that can be used and modified for other transit modes. Take a lane away from personal cars and dedicate it to buses so they can run faster and avoid traffic. Remove some street parking spots and create a protected bike lane or a street market or something else. The extra space can be a huge boon. It’s pavement, basically a blank canvas imo.
by liampulles | 2025-12-12 07:24:58+00:00
I read an article linked on HN once (can't remember what it was) that recommended giving totally meaningless names to monoliths. The point being that one should not use the name as a crutch to decide what should or should not go in the service.

So at my last job, we called our monolith anubis. It always brought joy when someone asked for an explanation.
by stimm | 2025-12-12 07:25:04+00:00
What it is: Stimm is an Open Source (AGPL v3) platform designed to orchestrate low-latency voice conversations with AI agents. We focused heavily on the Python/FastAPI event loop and media transport (using LiveKit for WebRTC) to achieve a near real-time feel.

Why we built it: Tired of the 3-second delay in commercial voice bots. Stimm provides a robust foundation for building production-grade telephony and web-based agents.

Key features: Modularity (swap LLMs/STT/TTS easily), built-in SIP support, and Docker integration.

Looking forward to any technical feedback on the architecture!
by sho | 2025-12-12 07:25:33+00:00
I lived in thailand for a few years and one of their words/phrases stood out to me in situations like this:

Ow: want

Mai ow: don't want

These words are used eg. when ordering food or accepting/declining an offer at a checkout. Translated directly to dictionary English, they sound quite shockingly direct and rude - "would you like a drink? Don't want! How about bread sticks? Want!" - but after a while realized they were actually just very useful, special purpose words for making it known what you were interested in, with no other subtext.

It's funny how many gaps we have in English where there's just no good way to say something, at least concisely, and you don't even realize it until you see how other languages handle it. You'd think we'd have evolved it by now.

The same goes in the other direction, of course!
by TomK32 | 2025-12-12 07:26:18+00:00
I'll give it a try and let me know if you need a German translation.

I recently started using beaverhabits https://github.com/daya0576/beaverhabits/ for its simplicity but obviously I love gamification.

A few things I noticed though: * I'd love to add a task to a future date. * A flag on (future) tasks to notify when I ought to start them * Please pre-fill the minutes with 00 * The icons selection for the profiles is a bit boring. Why not just a search across whatever icon font (unicode?) you use? * Is there a dedicated view for just the profile without the noise around it? * There's a little animation that moves a task up when I hover it on desktop, is that by design?
by aurareturn | 2025-12-12 07:26:51+00:00
AI bubble isn't even as big as the railroad and dotcom bubbles yet in terms of relative size to the total economy.

Yet, I feel like AI is more transformative for society than both.

One difference between dotcom and AI is that with AI, most people feel like their jobs can be automated away in a few years. This includes everyone from office workers to software devs to warehouse workers.

I don't think dotcom ever threatened this many jobs, right?
by cess11 | 2025-12-12 07:27:09+00:00
I did not write "all of these people". I pointed out that the state of Israel has refused to provide conditions for an investigation of what happened, and instead it has mainly been the press and leaks to the press that have shed light on the issue.

What we have known for sure since then is that the IDF brought helicopters to the area where the festival was held and Hellfire:d generously, hence the large amount of burnt cars and the typical markings on asphalt roads and so on that are clearly visible in the early photos.

This and the use of tank artillery against inhabitants of the kibbutzim has caused several scandals in israeli politics and the opposition has been requesting thorough investigation for a long time by now. The IDF calls this policy of killing your own soldiers and civilians the Hannibal directive.

I've been following this genocidal colony for decades, every time they've been "mowing the lawn" as they call it there is a massive amount of imagery of murdered kids coming out of the Gaza strip. The reason you think I'm lying is that you haven't been paying attention, and this is probably also why you react so strongly to a single recording of palestinians parading Shani Louk. It might also just be that you're racist and deem israelis or zionists generally more human than the people they are exterminating.
by elevateyou | 2025-12-12 07:28:14+00:00
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by simondotau | 2025-12-12 07:28:28+00:00
A typical ICE car will consume at least 500 gallons of petrol (gasoline) per 1 gallon of tire tread worn. The environmental impact per volume of tire is certainly greater, but it's not remotely five hundred times greater.

I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.
by manmal | 2025-12-12 07:29:22+00:00
I have this mental model of LLMs and their capabilities, formed after months of way too much coding with CC and Codex, with 4 recursive problem categories:

1. Problems that have been solved before have their solution easily repeated (some will say, parroted/stolen), even with naming differences.

2. Problems that need only mild amalgamation of previous work are also solved by drawing on training data only, but hallucinations are frequent (as low probability tokens, but as consumers we don’t see the p values).

3. Problems that need little simulation can be simulated with the text as scratchpad. If evaluation criteria are not in training data -> hallucination.

4. Problems that need more than a little simulation have to either be solved by adhoc written code, or will result in hallucination. The code written to simulate is again a fractal of problems 1-4.

Phrased differently, sub problem solutions must be in the training data or it won’t work; and combining sub problem solutions must be either again in training data, or brute forcing + success condition is needed, with code being the tool to brute force.

I _think_ that the SOTA models are trained to categorize the problem at hand, because sometimes they answer immediately (1&2), enable thinking mode (3), or write Python code (4).

My experience with CC and Codex has been that I must steer it away from categories 2 & 3 all the time, either solving them myself, ask them to use web research, or split them up until they are (1) problems.

Of course, for many problems you’ll only know the category once you’ve seen the output, and you need to be able to verify the output.

I suspect that if you gave Claude/Codex access to a circuit simulator, it will successfully brute force the solution. And future models might be capable enough to write their own simulator adhoc (ofc the simulator code might recursively fall into category 2 or 3 somewhere and fail miserably). But without strong verification I wouldn’t put any trust in the outcome.

With code, we do have the compiler, tests, observed behavior, and a strong training data set with many correct implementations of small atomic problems. That’s a lot of out of the box verification to correct hallucinations. I view them as messy code generators I have to clean up after. They do save a ton of coding work after or while I‘m doing the other parts of programming.
by nicolas_t | 2025-12-12 07:30:17+00:00
My concern is very much those two concerns plus the fact that I value being able to be anonymous. We're increasingly losing that in the real world with CCTV and AI that would eventually allow people to be tracked (like in China), I do want to have one last bastion of privacy.

That said, I fully support laws that ban phones at school, I chose my kid's school because they do not allow any electronic devices on campus outside the computer lab where kids can go to to do research. Every day when I bring my kid to the school bus, I see that children say hello to each other and start chatting. There's another very well ranked school that picks up kids in front of my apartment and they allow phones. The kids all stare fixedly on their phones as soon as they sit on the bus. Having a country wide ban of mobile devices in all schools would I think serve most of the same purpose as the social media ban while having a lot less externalities.
by frabonacci | 2025-12-12 07:30:55+00:00
Same here. I even blamed it on switching between Italian and Spanish all the time and thought my brain was short-circuiting. But when you see the right key light up and a different letter shows up, something’s clearly off. Also: with battery saver on it’s basically unusable - the lag makes typing way worse. The video was oddly comforting. Turns out I’m not losing it.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-12 07:30:55+00:00
While we're (recklessly?) cross pollinating here's a mathoverflow that really makes it look like Little's Law can (has to?) be rearranged to form an entropy-flux equation.

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/397492/definition-of-entr...

MACSYMA mentioned in the link too https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900008060/downloads/19...
by postalcoder | 2025-12-12 07:31:03+00:00
gpt-5* reasoning models do not have an adjustable temperature parameter. It seems like we may have a different understanding of these models.

And, like the other commenter said, the temperature may change the distribution of the next token, but the reasoning tends to reel those things in, which is why reasoning models are notoriously poor at creative writing.

You are free to run these experiments for yourself. Perhaps, with your deeper understanding, you'll shed new light on this behavior.
by isopede | 2025-12-12 07:31:32+00:00
I have such fond memories of the Nokia N810.

I did my master’s thesis on that device. I had a custom hypervisor running a guest kernel, virtualized networking, and a buildroot userspace. I could SSH into the host N810, then SSH into the guest. I even virtualized the framebuffer at some point and got the “dancing baby” animation playing from the guest. It only ran at a couple frames per second, but it was _amazing_.
by TomK32 | 2025-12-12 07:32:47+00:00
My brother was diagnosed in his first year at school, didn't help prevent his criminal career later on. Diagnosis, even a self-diagnosis like I did at 42, is just the first step but for kids the right actions and help could indeed prevent so much suffering. Self-medication, drug abuse to calm down the mind, can be prevented quite easily with proper ADHD medication that shows a great rate of success.

Studies from Norway and the US show results fitting this one https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12888-021-03223-0 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2581455/
by mrtksn | 2025-12-12 07:33:16+00:00
When I read the title I hoped that EFF was going to do exactly that.

There’s also a way to improve it: Sell “age verification cards” in physical stores. Just like they are verifying that minors aren’t buying alcohol or cigarettes, they can verify that these cards are bought only by grown ups. Sure wouldn’t be perfect but it greatly improves anonymity and especially in paid-for adult services can be used as a payment method so repeat verification will happen for top ups.