MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-12-29 00:12:33+00:00
I'm constantly reminded about the 2000 election. Part of Al Gore's communications strategy was to constantly talk about the "top 1%". Now he wasn't wrong about this but interestingly there was a survey in 2000 that showed that 19% of people thought they were the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be someday.

This is how successful American propaganda is. 39% of people believed something that definitionally could never be true.

So you will find people who make average salaries defending the stratospheric salaries of CEOs because they believe they'll one day be the one benefitting or they've fallen for some sort of propaganda such as the myth of meritocracy or prosperity gospel.

Our entire economy is designed around exploiting working people and extracting all of their wealth to a tiny portion of the population. And we're reachign the point where the bottom 50% (if not more) have nothing left to exploit.

Ai and automation could be used to improve all of our lives. It isn't and it won't be. It'll be used to suppress wages and displace workers so this massive wealth transfer can be accelerated.

I get the point of the article. But those with the wealth won't let themselves be replaced by AI and seemingly the populace will never ask the question of why they can't be replaced until economic conditiosn deteriorate even further.
by gruez | 2025-12-29 00:13:15+00:00
Honestly, I think the gamma normalization step don't really count as "processing", any more than the gzip decompression step doesn't count as "processing" for the purposes of "this is what an unprocessed html file looks like" demo. At the end of the day, it's the same information, but encoded differently. Similar arguments can be made for de-bayer filter step. If you ignore these two steps, the "processing" that happens looks far less dramatic.
by dfe | 2025-12-29 00:13:34+00:00
Correct.

Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.

It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.
Loneliness at 19, How to Cope?
by yresting | 2025-12-29 00:13:40+00:00
I am a college student and for my entire life I have been lonely. This is probably taken a very heavy toll on my mental health but that’s another story. I’ve never been able to make friends and keep meaningful connections that last a long time. In fact I’d go as far as saying I have never had a friend, and I currently don’t have any. My phone is empty, when I go to school nobody talks to me and when I do find people who seem to have some kind of interest in me, it usually doesn’t last very long since they don’t prioritize whatever we have. As far as I’m aware I am tolerable to be around. People find me funny and when I do talk to people we have decent conversations (though small talk tends to bore me). However that doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t bring me any kind of comfort or fulfillment. I’ve attributed my lack of friends to something that places all the blame on me. Maybe I’m ugly, maybe I’m not funny enough, maybe I’m dumb. I don’t know if that’s the right approach. But I’ve tried so many different things, I’ve read so many different books and yet I still can’t get anyone to even bother to ask me how my day was or care to actually do something and hang out with me when I ask if they’d like too.

What am I supposed to do? Be lonely and without any kind of company and human connection my entire life?
by dmitrygr | 2025-12-29 00:14:38+00:00
FYI, at least in C/C++, the compiler is free to throw away assignments to any memory pointed to by a pointer if said pointer is about to be passed to free(), so depending on how you did this, no perf impact could have been because your compiler removed the assignment. This will even affect a call to memset()

see here: https://godbolt.org/z/rMa8MbYox
by dheera | 2025-12-29 00:15:17+00:00
Photography is also an art. When painters jack up saturations in their choices of paint colors people don't bat an eyelid. There's no good reason photographers cannot take that liberty as well, and tone mapping choices is in fact a big part of photographers' expressive medium.

If you want reality, go there in person and stop looking at photos. Viewing imagery is a fundamentally different type of experience.
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-29 00:16:17+00:00
I studied remote sensing in undergrad and it really helped me grok sensors and signal processing. My favourite mental model revelation to come from it was that what I see isn’t the “ground truth.” It’s a view of a subset of the data. My eyes, my cat’s eyes, my cameras all collect and render different subsets of the data, providing different views of the subject matter.

It gets even wilder when perceiving space and time as additional signal dimensions.

I imagine a sort of absolute reality that is the universe. And we’re all just sensor systems observing tiny bits of it in different and often overlapping ways.
by mrandish | 2025-12-29 00:17:12+00:00
News agencies like AP have already come up with technical standards and guidelines to technically define 'acceptable' types and degrees of image processing applied to professional photo-journalism.

You can look it up because it's published on the web but IIRC it's generally what you'd expect. It's okay to do whole-image processing where all pixels have the same algorithm applied like the basic brightness, contrast, color, tint, gamma, levels, cropping, scaling, etc filters that have been standard for decades. The usual debayering and color space conversions are also fine. Selectively removing, adding or changing only some pixels or objects is generally not okay for journalistic purposes. Obviously, per-object AI enhancement of the type many mobile phones and social media apps apply by default don't meet such standards.
by iliketrains | 2025-12-29 00:17:20+00:00
From my experience, performance gains seen in Debug builds in Unity/C#/Mono nearly always translate in gains in Release mode. I know that this is not always true, but in this context that's my experience.

Setting up release benchmarks is much more complex and we develop the game in Debug mode, so it is very natural to get the first results there, and if promising, validate them in Release.

Also, since our team works in Debug mode, even gains that only speed things up in Debug mode are valuable for us, but I haven't encountered a case where I would see 20%+ perf gain in Debug mode that would not translate to Release mode.
by 1a527dd5 | 2025-12-29 00:17:54+00:00
> In 2018, Unity engineers discussed that they are working on porting the engine to .NET CoreCLR

Hard task, no doubt. Unity needs to throw everything at this problem. C# in general has gotten insanely fast by default. It's very much worth taking the time to upgrade/update.

Whilst we don't compare in size and api surface, it took us a few months to get off 472 and onto dotnet6. But once we were on dotnet6, moving to the LTS after that was relatively painless; usually a few hours of work.
by apsdsm | 2025-12-29 00:18:05+00:00
A hundred thousand posts on HN about how you can, without hesitation, replace your network security team with AI, and you can see the flood of CEOs (or CEO wannabes) nodding and murmuring about saving costs. A single post about CEOs being automated and all of a sudden it’s all about “intangible human relation skills” and “AI couldn’t possibly” and “but my network of angel investors and other CEOs”.

I swear there’s a joke or cautionary tale here somewhere about “first they came for..” or something along those lines. The phrasing escapes me.

Maybe the problem isn’t that you can’t automate a CEO, it’s that the actual tangible work just isn’t worth as much as some companies pay for it, and this thread it touching a few too many raw nerves.

Well, either way it’s hilarious.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-29 00:18:37+00:00
Yeah, how many studies are done a year? Random chance is the #1 explanation with that small of a sample size. It doesn't take a degree in stats say that the next thing that needs to be done is to replicate the study a few times before making any claims or searching for any publicity. This subject is so emotional for the families involved that publicizing without more confirmation is a bit irresponsible especially if it is easy to do follow-up studies.
by NotNerdz | 2025-12-29 00:18:58+00:00
It feels like just 1 month ago InfiniaxAI was an entirely different platform. Back then you couldnt breathe, the UI's were condensed and features were oblivious to users. Now? InfiniaxAI Is the haven of thousands of developers daily to utilize any AI tool in the world and they are launching a one of its kind IDE next year!
by goldsteinq | 2025-12-29 00:19:07+00:00
I’m facing it on Element Desktop, but I’ll try to reproduce it on Element Web. I’ve tried to submit logs from Element Desktop, but it says that `/rageshake` (which I was told to do) is not a command. I’m happy to help with debugging this, but I’m not sure how to submit logs from Desktop.

Something like this happens basically every time I try to use Matrix though. Messages are not decrypting, or not being delivered, or devices can’t be authenticated for some cryptic reason. The reason I even tried to use Element Desktop is because my nheko is seemingly now incapable of sending direct messages (the recepient just gets infinite “waiting for message”).
by shimman | 2025-12-29 00:19:32+00:00
CEOs usually follow the worse forms of human collaboration known to our species: totalitarianism, dictatorships, monarchies, and centrally planned messes.

Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged. Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-29 00:19:33+00:00
I built a local competitive programming judge a while back where I fell into the exact trap of manually correlating steady_clock and system_clock.

I was timestamping everything using steady_clock to strictly enforce the time limits, and then just applied a calculated offset to convert that to wall time for the "Submission Date" display.
It worked in testing, but during a long stress-test session, my laptop did an NTP sync. The logs then showed submissions appearing to happen before the source code file was last modified, which confused the caching logic. I was essentially betting that system_clock was stable relative to steady_clock over the process lifetime.

I eventually refactored to exactly what the article suggests: use steady_clock strictly for the runtime enforcement (is duration < 2.0s?), but capture system_clock::now() explicitly at the submission boundary for the logs, rather than trying to do math on the steady timestamp.

Also, +1 for std::chrono::round in C++20. I’ve seen code where duration_cast was used to "round" execution times to milliseconds for display, but it was silently flooring them. In a competitive programming context, reporting 1000ms when the actual time was 1000.9ms is a misleading difference because the latter gets Time Limit Exceeded error. Explicit rounding makes the intent much clearer.
by dustbunny | 2025-12-29 00:20:10+00:00
Writing C# in godot is a bad choice. Use GDScript and directly write c++ as a module. Skip "HD extension" completely. Godots build system is easy enough to use. Just add new classes to the engine using c++ if you don't want to use GDScript. The GDScript workflow is honestly great. Using C# is like the worst of all worlds.
by yooogurt | 2025-12-29 00:20:43+00:00
Alternatively, we'll see a drop in deployment diversity, with more and more functionality shifted to centralised providers that have economies of scale and the resources to optimise.

E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop.

If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies, making use on desktops less viable.

Who will realistically be optimising build times for usecases that don't have sub-ms access to build caches, and when those build caches are available, what will stop the median program from having even larger dependency graphs.
by nospice | 2025-12-29 00:21:14+00:00
"Flat" is a bit of a misnomer in this context. It's not flat, it's actually a logarithmic ("log profile") representation of data computed by the camera to allow a wider dynamic range to be squeezed into traditional video formats.

It's sort of the opposite of what's going on with photography, where you have a dedicated "raw" format with linear readings from the sensor. Without these formats, someone would probably have invented "log JPEG" or something like that to preserve more data in highlights and in the shadows.
by thefaux | 2025-12-29 00:21:33+00:00
This logic is both too broad and rigid to be of much practical use[1]. It needs to be tightened to compare languages that are identical except for static type checks, otherwise the statically typed language could admit other kinds of errors (memory errors immediately come to mind) that many dynamic languages do not have and you would need some way of weighing the relative cost to reliability of the different categories of errors.

Even if the two languages are identical except for the static types, then it is clearly possible to write programs that do not have any runtime type errors in the dynamic language (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove this but it is very clearly true) so there exist programs in any dynamic language that are equally reliable to their static counterpart.

[1] I also disagree with your definition of reliability but I'm granting it for the sake of discussion.
by mvkel | 2025-12-29 00:21:52+00:00
This is a personal reflection checklist and weak as a general theory of decision quality. You could avoid violating every one of these, and won't automatically have a good decision.

For example, layoffs feel "icky" and are almost always the right business decision.

Other "violations": NASA existing at all; early COVID lockdowns; Tesla remaining solvent; the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Ultimately, you can't judge whether a decision was good/bad until time passes. What you can do at the point of decision is ask yourself if it believably steps towards mission fulfillment, and if it reflects your values.

If one of your values is "be an asshole," then a good decision is the one that a really good asshole would make, not one that an asshole-who-is-trying-really hard-not-to-be-an-asshole would.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-29 00:22:36+00:00
Upon inspection, the author's personal website used em dashes in 2023. I hope this helped with your witch hunt.

I'm imagining a sort of Logan's Run-like scifi setup where only people with a documented em dash before November 30, 2022, i.e. D(ash)-day, are left with permission to write.
by Sparkle-san | 2025-12-29 00:22:44+00:00
I'm deeply skeptical of CEOs being "built different" like some people are arguing here. If Elon can be CEO of three companies and the founder of a couple more while also finding time to tweet 50+ times a day, have a failed and embarrassing stint in trying to optimize the federal government, and get K-holed at parties then the demands of the job can't be that rigorous.

If anything, I would argue that the strategic decisions actually can be automated/performed via broader consensus. With that handled, all that's left is the cartel that CEOs have invented to justify their exhorbant pay packages.
by qnleigh | 2025-12-29 00:22:48+00:00
This feels a bit like semantics. To get something big done you have to build consensus (e.g. on what to build and what resources to dedicate to it) and align incentives. Oftentimes these things require building relationships and trust first. I would consider all of these things to be a part of politics, but your definition seems to only include the bad stuff.
by avaer | 2025-12-29 00:23:34+00:00
Last year's joke is next year's reality.

Every year I feel a bit less crazy in my silly armchair speculation that the Second Renaissance from the Animatrix is a good documentary. If AI "takes over" it will be via economic means and people will go willingly until they have gradually relinquished control of the world to something alien. (Landian philosophers make the case that hyperstitional capitalism has already done this)

I would take the over that this will happen sooner than later -- when it's proven to make a lot of money to have an AI CEO, suddenly everyone will change their tune and jump on the bandwagon with dollar signs in their eyes, completely ignoring what they are giving up.

Except unlike e.g. the metaverse/cryptocurrency bandwagon of yesteryear, there's no getting off.
by Quothling | 2025-12-29 00:24:04+00:00
My m1 air with 8gb of ram has been doing docker and all my golang, C/Zig and Python work without issues so far. If I were to sell it, I'd probably grade the keyboard and mousepad (the clicking) 5/10 now. Not sure if it's because I've been a little rough with it (I have small children who sometimes kick the keyboard etc) or if the quality is lower than it was back when I had my 201(5 or 6) macbook pro which was frankly in a condition as good as new when I switched to this one.

It throttes and stuff, but it still outperforms the t14 i7 with 32gb ram I've got from my company. Granted, that one has a lot of enterprice stuff running, but still...

I do hope someone will make a pc that is as close to an air as possible though. I like Apple, but I'm not a fan of being bound to an US tech company these days. I'm not important enough to be targeted personally, but what if the US government decides to ban all Danes from US tech in the war for Greenland? Or the more likely scenario, what if Apple decides to go full Microsoft with AI and what not?
by addaon | 2025-12-29 00:24:38+00:00
> Question: are SoCs with on die memory be effected by this?

SoCs with on-die memory (which is, these days, exclusively SRAM, since I don't think IBM's eDRAM process for mixing DRAM with logic is still in production) will not be effected. SiPs with on-package DRAM, including Apple's A and M series SiPs and Qualcomm's Snapdragon, will be effected -- they use the same DRAM dice as everyone else.
by metadope | 2025-12-29 00:25:07+00:00
I whole-heartedly agree with your recommendation and join in encouraging more adopters of this philosophy and practice.

Life online without javascript is just better. I've noticed an increase in sites that are useful (readable) with javascript disabled. Better than 10 years ago, when broken sites were rampant. Though there are still the lazy ones that are just blank pages without their javascript crutch.

Maybe the hardware/resource austerity that seems to be upon us now will result in people and projects refactoring, losing some glitter and glam, getting lean. We can resolve to slim down, drop a few megs of bloat, use less ram and bandwidth. It's not a problem; it's an opportunity!

In any case, Happy New Year! [alpha preview release]
by linsomniac | 2025-12-29 00:25:27+00:00
I had a very similar experience. For 1995 it was really quite amazing! Loved how quickly it connected ("I never have to listen to a pair of modems sniff each others butts again!"), and that I could place/receive a call while still being online. Also, the voice quality really was superior, even when receiving a call from a regular POTS call on the other end.

Unfortunately, after the first year of having it, US West (Omaha Nebraska USA telco) started "actively discouraging" ISDN (source, I worked at US West at the time and was asking a sales tech about it). I had wanted to move to a larger apartment in the same building, but doing so would have increased my ISDN cost from $40/mo to by-the-minute $400-ish/mo.

I used a Motorola Bitsurfer on Linux. But my other computer, an HP 9000s712 ("Gecko") had an ISDN modem that was SCSI. That seemed like a weird choice, but their serial port was only rated up to 115.2K so it was the only choice for 128K.
by shakna | 2025-12-29 00:25:33+00:00
However, if you recast to volatile, the compiler will keep it:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

void free(void* ptr);
void not_free(void* ptr);

void test_with_free(char* ptr) {
ptr[5] = 6;
void *(* volatile memset_v)(void *s, int c, size_t n) = memset;
memset_v(ptr + 2, 3, 4);
free(ptr);
}

void test_with_other_func(char* ptr) {
ptr[5] = 6;
void *(* volatile memset_v)(void *s, int c, size_t n) = memset;
memset_v(ptr + 2, 3, 4);
not_free(ptr);
}
by bsder | 2025-12-29 00:28:08+00:00
I would actually argue that your examples prove my point.

The best transit systems are the ones that are almost fully subsidized with a token payment that doesn't price discriminate. We have strong examples of the problems with price discrimination in water (the entire American Southwest). Electricity "markets" gave us Enron and semi-privatized electric companies are currently giving us shutdowns because they are liable for causing fires--neither of these would be an issue if electricity is a flat market based on usage without price discrimination.

Everything you mentioned used to be what we called a "utility" and was the job of government to provide, oversee and generally subsidize. It was only since about 1980 that governments started trying to "privatize" these kinds of things with the magical thinking that somehow "profit incentive" would magically make them cheaper to run.

Yes, usage above and beyond basic levels was generally paid for at "point of use"--especially if the resource was limited (see: water). However, that payment needs to be somehow "metered" and with pricing that rises significantly as usage moves further from baseline in order to disincentivize over-consumption.

In the case of tolls (which started this discussion), that means the baseline price should be set to "damage incurred" which is "fourth power of weight" (if I remember correctly). Cars should be a low price; brodozers should pay significantly more than cars; loaded semis should pay a lot more. Adjust as necessary based upon time and load in order to manage traffic.

By linking to something directly meterable, you avoid the perverse incentives where the poor get disproportionately hit and the rich simply ignore everything (see: Nestle pumping water out of aquifers).
by amluto | 2025-12-29 00:28:26+00:00
> The voracious demand for HBM by hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon, has forced the three biggest memory manufacturers (Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology) to pivot their limited cleanroom space and capital expenditure towards higher margin enterprise-grade components. This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop.

> As a result, IDC expects 2026 DRAM and NAND supply growth be below historical norms at 16% year-on-year and 17% year-on-year, respectively.

This is an odd claim. It’s like saying that car companies historically produced more coupes than sedans, but suddenly there are new enormous orders for millions of sedans. All cars get massively more expensive as a result — car makers charge 50-200% more than before. Sure, they need to retool a little bit and buy more doors, but somehow the article claims that “limited … capital expenditure” means that overall production will grow more slowly than historical rates?

This only makes sense either on extremely short timescales (as retooling distracts form expansion) or if the car makers decide not to try to compete with each other. Otherwise some of those immediately available profits would turn into increased capital expenditure and more RAM would be produced. (Heck, if RAM makers think the new demand is sustainable, they should be happy to increase production to sell more units at current prices.)