MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-10 16:59:05+00:00
> Coffee vending machines? That’s what’s inside the box, it’s nothing new really… There are very high quality ones too.

I have yet to see a high-quality one.

I've been at two offices that have automated espresso machines. They'll make something that's labeled as a "Latte", but it's just coffee with powdered milk.
by estebank | 2025-12-10 16:59:38+00:00
When it comes to nightly features use, it is good to note that a stable compiler, a nightly corresponding to the date beta for that stable was branched out and an arbitrary nightly are different. A branched-off nightly might have had beta back ports for fixing stable features that the nightly will not have, and a nightly feature that is subtly broken on stable but isn't used in std will not have received a backport. So using nightly feature on stable might mean every now and then skipping a stable version, and using a nightly compiler means having to do thorough testing after updating on arbitrary days. Any given nightly has high chances of being fine, but every update brings the possibility of bugs.
by anticrymactic | 2025-12-10 16:59:44+00:00
> Why is that problematic? They don't have your private keys and their "level of access" is equivalent to any other certificate authority that your browser trusts.

Let's Encrypt could stop issuing certificates to you, if the administration decided that necessary. This would at least disrupt whatever you were serving. Not that I think this is likely, only possible.

I think LE clealy demonstrated the need for a accessible free ACME authority. But it is high time for more alternatives (EU and China at least). FWIW: Everything around public infrastructure should be run decentralized not-for-profit using national resources. Things like DNS Registrars are silly if you think about it. They just buy it from TLD holders anyway.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-10 17:00:04+00:00
> This leads to the erroneous assumption that making the rich less rich will make the poor less poor. That's obviously not the case.

Taking more money from the poor makes them more poor.

Taking more from the rich 'harms' them less because of the margin utility of money: taking $1k from someone making $160k is qualitatively different from someone making $60k. Taking 20% from someone making $160k ($32k) is qualitatively different than taking 20% from someone making $60k ($12k).

So if you want to have X revenues for funding government, you can take it from those who have more marginal need of it, or those who have less.
by anima-core | 2025-12-10 17:00:13+00:00
The substack isnt what was supposed to be evaluated, it was the repo. That's creative writing and the repo is sciencetific. Two different things. One has nothing to do with the other. The technical direction here is straightforward, almost boring in a sense: freeze the teacher, extract intermediate activations, compress, then train a student to match the compressed fields. Sometimes when people aren't able to evaluate the work, they dig for something else online that they can comment on or bring down. The only thing I can offer in response is the simplest one: look at the code and the experiments themselves, not the narrative around them. Everything in the paper is fully reproducible from the reference implementation, and every number in the results section came from running those scripts, not from a model filling in blanks. The surprise is not in the prose, but in how much structure those early-layer fields ended up carrying.

If you think something in the repo looks wrong or inflated, I’m happy to walk through it point by point. I have no problem with hard questions. What matters to me is whether the experiments hold when someone else runs them, not whether the story around them fits a certain aesthetic.
by coldpie | 2025-12-10 17:00:15+00:00
> I think if I could afford to retire tomorrow, I'd have no trouble keeping myself busy for the rest of my life.

Completely agreed. I took 6 weeks off between jobs a couple years ago, the longest continuous span without work or school since I was 14. It seemed crazy long. My goal was to get bored so I'd be ready to go back to having a job at the end of it. I completely failed, I filled those 6 weeks and would eagerly have filled many more self-directed months. Maybe it'll be different when I'm older but right now, I could easily spend years and years keeping myself busy if I didn't have like bills and stuff to pay.
by xphos | 2025-12-10 17:00:53+00:00
Its in a talk about File systems in Rust for Linux. Basically the rust maintainer who I think stepped down was talking about how the C-code base for VFS has a lot of documented but complex orderings where you have to call a lock, or pin before accessing an Inode(or something) one way but not the other. They made a bunch of Rust Types so you basically could not produce an illegal ordering and got heckled pretty hard by the "bearded guy". They basically run out the presentation time with heckling and I think the Rust maintainer quit a few months later (over many similar instances of this. don't quote me time line here)

[source] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-12-10 17:00:55+00:00
For the longest time, I wanted to really dive deep into lower-level learning (e.g. C, Assembly, HDL, chips). LLMs temporarily killed my motivation to continue learning C. I wanted to build a clipboard history similar to windows 11, but for a Linux-based OS. Prompted ChatGPT for the code, and it spit some out. It was pretty bad, nowhere near a finished project. I deleted the LLM code and started anew.

I remembered why I wanted to learn this stuff. It's not for money, or to look cool.

It's for the fascination I have for computing.

How do electrons flow through a wire? How do the chips within a computer direct that flow to produce an image on a screen? These questions are mind-blowing for me. I don't think LLMs can kill this fascination. Although, for web programming, sure. I always hated front-end programming, and now I don't really have to do it (I don't have the same fascination for the why of such tech). So will I ever learn a new front-end framework? Most likely not.
by a2128 | 2025-12-10 17:00:56+00:00
Plenty of people do want to make the efforts and have tried. Physical retailers like Walmart have opened online retail but adoption remains limited. Startups like Jet.com, Quidsi, Fab.com, Rakuten/Buy.com, Woot and many others have tried and failed to take on Amazon, leading to bankruptcy or being sold. The reality is that nobody can take on Amazon due to their slimy tactics but also nobody can realistically provide something to customers that Amazon doesn't already provide. Fees will keep increasing and costs inflating as much as Amazon wants, while customers are none the wiser and sellers can do nothing about it.
Show HN: Chefs.Video – A marketplace where you pay freelancers $0.005/second
by ufvy | 2025-12-10 17:00:56+00:00
Hello HN,

I’m the solo developer behind Chefs.Video. It’s a platform for hiring freelancers (devs, designers, editors) by watching them work live, rather than relying on portfolios or resumes.

The Problem: I got burned hiring a React developer on Fiverr. He had 5-star reviews and a great portfolio. It took 2 weeks and $300 to realize he was outsourcing the work and pasting bad jQuery code. Portfolios are easy to fake; live problem-solving isn't.

The Solution: I built a "Live Kitchen" concept. Instead of interviewing or sending take-home tests, you invite the candidate to a paid session.

Video + Screen Share: Built on LiveKit (WebRTC). Low latency is critical so you can direct them ("change that color", "fix that bug") in real-time.

Per-Second Billing: Users pay $0.005/second (~$18/hr).

The "Kill Switch": If the candidate is struggling or using AI to fake it, you can click "Kick". The Webhook immediately cuts the connection and stops the billing. You only pay for the minutes used.

The Tech Stack:

Frontend: Next.js 14 (App Router)

Video Infrastructure: LiveKit (SFU architecture, handles the simulcast for group rooms).

Backend/DB: Convex. (I moved away from Supabase for this because the real-time sync for the "Cost Monitor" needed to be instant).

Billing: Stripe Connect. We use "Destination Charges" to split the payment (Platform fee + Freelancer payout) instantly.

Storage: Cloudflare R2 (for storing the session recordings).

Challenges: The hardest part was the billing logic. Syncing the participant_left webhook from LiveKit with Stripe to ensure we calculate the exact millisecond the user was kicked (to avoid overcharging) was tricky. We settled on a pre-authorization model (holding $20) and finalizing the capture when the room closes.

Why I'm posting: I know this borders on "micromanagement" for some, but I see it as a "paid audition." I’d love feedback on the WebRTC implementation and the billing architecture.

Try it out (you get $20 in credits to test the system): https://chefs.video
by jsheard | 2025-12-10 17:00:57+00:00
> Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees...

That's not quite what Raspberry Pi did with the RP2350 (the ARM and RV cores are wholly separate) but they did include the ability to fuse off one side or the other, so I wonder if they'll release a cheaper RV-only version at some point.
by arghwhat | 2025-12-10 17:01:01+00:00
Yes but someone might also have silly opinions from having no experience how production assembly actually looks, such as underestimating just how different working with that is to working in high-level languages like C and why such languages were quite revolutionary. :)

This should not be mistaken as appeal to authority, it is merely reasonable discrimination between those speaking from experience, and those forming opinions without experience.

If one believes those with experience has poorly informed opinions, they're always free to gain experience and associated perspective. They will then either have the fundamentals to properly push their viewpoint, or end up better understanding and aligning with the common viewpoint.
by atonse | 2025-12-10 17:01:02+00:00
We like to pretend that this is something new. Before free porn on the internet, what did people do?

- They bought porn from stores (no anonymity)

- They rented porn from hotel rooms

- They paid for it on pay per view channels (how many kids growing up in the 90s remember watching the fuzzy scrambled Spice channel and trying to make out a boob somewhere in the garbled picture?)

- They went to movie theaters for porn! I've never actually seen this but have read about it.

NONE of those actions are anonymous. They're even documented and associated with real identities.

If you're telling me that somehow adding some kind of verifiable age gates to things like porn (and social media) will lead to authoritarianism, we don't have to theorize. We ran this experiment already. And nobody had issues with it, realistically.

We're still running this experiment. If you try to watch an R rated movie in a theater, they will likely ask you for ID if you're clearly under 17. They used to do that to me growing up.

The current state of "Kids can access all this without any protection at any time" is abnormal. It's NOT normal.

We can all have a reasonable conversation here without always bringing in the authoritarianism boogeyman.
by lkbm | 2025-12-10 17:01:37+00:00
Pretty much any new car sold in the US, Canada, Mexico, and most of Europe. "Western" typically refers to "countries rich/developed enough to [in this case] add emissions regulations". It's a luxury that many countries haven't gotten to yet, but is widespread in North America and Europe.

The good news is that I believe Ho Chi Minh City is about to start, so hopefully they'll have much cleaner air in a couple years.
by ufvy | 2025-12-10 17:01:57+00:00
OP here. A few technical details on the video implementation if anyone is interested:

We are using Simulcast for the video tracks. Since a 'Chef' (Buyer) might have 5 freelancers in a room sharing screens simultaneously, bandwidth was a massive bottleneck in early testing.

We configured the LiveKit room to dynamically downgrade the video resolution of the 4 'passive' screens while keeping the 'active' focused screen in 1080p.

Also, regarding the 'surveillance' aspect: I know this is controversial. The goal isn't to watch someone work for 8 hours a day. It's designed for 15-30 minute sprints to verify skill before offering a longer contract. Think of it like a pair-programming interview, but paid.
by glenstein | 2025-12-10 17:01:59+00:00
I'm seeing the amoeba as approximately the size of the heel segment of a ladybug's leg. I consider lady bugs pretty small in an intuitive sense, their legs quite small and the smallest end segment to be especially small. I think that leaves an amoeba on the fringes of distinguishable perception which seems right to me, unless I'm overestimating their size.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-10 17:02:22+00:00
I didn't claim that you were doing formal proofs. You can still make bad rhetoric, formal or not. You can say "The sky is blue, therefore C is a memory safe language" and that's trivially inferred to be faulty reasoning. For many people bad deduction is easier to pick up on than bad induction, but they're both rhetorically catastrophic. You are making a similarly unsound conclusion to the ridiculous example above, its not a valid statistical generalization. Formal or not the rhetoric is faulty.

> would you say "have you done a scientific study on the average journey times across the year and for different locations to know that it was actually bad"?

In response to a similarly suspiciously faulty inductive claim? Yeah, absolutely.

> We aren't talking about whether LLMs are better than humans.

The point I'm making here is specifically in response to the idea that it would "be surprising" if LLMs produced substantially worse code in Rust than they did in C. The paper I posted is merely a touch point to demonstrate substantial deviation in results in an adjacent context. Rust has lower surface area to make certain classes of vulns under certain conditions, but that's not isomorphic with the kind of behavior LLMs exhibit. We don't have:

- Guarantees LLMs will restrict themselves to operating in safe Rust

- Guarantees these specific vulnerabilities are statistically significant in comparative LLM output

- The vulnerability severity will be lower in Rust

Where I think you might be misunderstanding me is that this isn't a statement of empirical epistemological negativism. I'm underlining that this context is way too complex to be attempting prediction. I think it should be studied, and I hope that it's the case LLMs can write good, high quality safe Rust reliably. But specifically advocating for it on gut assumptions? No. We are advocating for safety here.

Because of how chaotic this context is, we can't reasonably assume anything here without explicit data to back it up. It's no better than trying to predict the weather based on your gut. Hence, why I asked for specific data to back the claim up. Even safe Rust isn't safe from security vulnerabilities stemming from architectural inadequacies and panics. It very well may be the case that in reasonably comparable contexts, LLMs produce security vulnerabilities in real Rust codebases at the same rate they create similar vulnerabilities in C. It might also be the case that they produce low severity issues in C at a similar statistical rate as high severity issues in Rust. For instance, buffer overflows manifesting in 30% of sample C codebase resulting in unexploitable segfaults, vs architectural deficiencies in a safe Rust codebase, manifesting in 30% of cases, that allow exfiltration of everything in your databases without RCE. Under these conditions, I don't think it's reasonable to say Rust is a better choice.

Again, it's not a critique in some epistemological negativist sense. It's a critique that you are underestimating how chaotic this context actually is, and the knock-on effects of that. Nothing should surprise you.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-12-10 17:02:24+00:00
When they come for Europe, they will come with nukes. It's clear they only need to protect St Petersburg and Moscow with SMD. The rest they are happy to let burn. Can England and France threaten Russia with retaliation? Trump has made it clear that Europe (maybe minus the UK, just maybe) is in the Russian sphere of influence, and we can't really count on the English to not Neville Chamberlain their way out of this.
by pm215 | 2025-12-10 17:02:36+00:00
The OED agrees about the Dutch idea, giving the etymology as:

"early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom) whirlpool < malen to grind, to whirl round (compare meal n.1) + stroom stream n"

and also thinks Dutch is the origin, with Swedish/Danish etc taking it from Dutch too:

"The use of maelstrom as a proper name (also in French) seems to come from Dutch maps, e.g. that in Mercator's Atlas (1595). There is little doubt that the word is native to Dutch (compare synonymous German regional (Low German) Maling). It is true that it is found in all the modern Scandinavian languages as a common noun, but in them it is purely literary, and likely to have been adopted from Dutch."
by falcor84 | 2025-12-10 17:02:37+00:00
I don't see any evidence of worker exploitation being caused in any even semi-direct way by AI integration. In the field of animation and VFX in particular, while I've never worked in that area myself, essentially everyone I've heard talk about it over decades has mentioned unbearable crunch being routine.

You mentioned earlier that AI makes labor weaker, but I really don't see a case for it. If anything, given how relatively cheap GenAI is, it should allow most anyone with artistic sensibilities and skill in the area who is willing to leverage it to go into business themselves with minimal capital. Why should GenAI give power to employers, especially if they're just paying another company for the AI models?
by offsign | 2025-12-10 17:03:16+00:00
One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes.

I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.

Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
by torginus | 2025-12-10 17:03:35+00:00
I'm curious why your perspective on Rust as a HW engineer. Hardware does a ton of things - DMA, interrupts, etc. that are not really compatible with Rust's memory model - after all Rust's immutable borrows should guarantee the values you are reading are not aliased by writers and should be staying constant as long as the borrow exists.

This is obviously not true when the CPU can either yank away the execution to a different part of the program, or some foreign entity can overwrite your memory.

Additionally, in low-level embedded systems, the existence of malloc is not a given, yet Rust seems to assume you can dynamically allocate memory with a stateless allocator.
by kldg | 2025-12-10 17:03:35+00:00
Rust works very well for vibe-coding because the compiler is typically very specific and a bit picky; helps keep it out of traps. I like using WASM with Rust as originator when vibe-coding because AI models are still very "sloppy/forgetful". There is one thing you should still definitely do beforehand, and that's pick out which crates you want and write up the initial Cargo.toml for it, because frontier models have a lot of trouble with fast-updated libraries.

What frontier models also excel at is writing their own libraries and skipping third-party dependencies. It's very easy for a human to just pick up a bloated 750kb library they're only going to actually use 15kb worth of its code for, BUT that library can serve as a valuable implementation model for someone very patient and willing to "reinvent the wheel" a little bit, which is definitely going to be AI and not me, because I just want to point to a black box and tell it what to do. For big things like web server, I'm still defaulting to Axum, but for things like making a JS soundbank parser/player or a WebGL2 mp4 & webm parser/demuxer & player, these are tasks frontier models are good for with the right prompting.

To an extent, maybe counter-intuitively, I think the big thing we'll see out of AI is an explosion of artisanship -- with humanoid robots in 2040, perhaps, our households may be making their own butter again, for example.
by mothballed | 2025-12-10 17:03:44+00:00
It bought quite a few people some extra hours or days during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And a couple women their lives, since one of the officers that saw them fight decided a few of the Jews were people with courage rather than just more trash for the incinerators and actually went out their way to send a couple of the brave fighters to the work camps instead of the gas chambers. (See woman on right here[], for example)

[] https://1943.pl/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Kobiet...
by bonzini | 2025-12-10 17:03:57+00:00
That was way way blown out of proportion. https://lwn.net/Articles/991062/ has a much less somber quote from just three months later:

> Ted Ts'o said that the Rust developers have been trying to avoid scaring kernel maintainers, and have been saying that "all you need is to learn a little Rust". But a little Rust is not enough to understand filesystem abstractions, which have to deal with that subsystem's complex locking rules. There is a need for documentation and tutorials on how to write filesystem code in idiomatic Rust. He said that he has a lot to learn; he is willing to do that, but needs help on what to learn
by rezamoaiandin | 2025-12-10 17:04:31+00:00
A joint study by Anthropic and the UK AI Security Institute found that bad actors only need to contaminate a dataset with around 250 malicious documents to introduce a specific backdoor, regardless of the dataset's total size.

The article argues that "Black Hat SEO" is effectively moving from manipulating PageRank to manipulating model weights ("AI Poisoning"). Instead of link farms, the new attack vector is seeding trigger words in training data to force specific hallucinations (e.g., making an LLM claim a competitor's product fails safety standards). Given that most brands/users won't notice the poisoning until the model is already trained and live, does this effectively kill the idea of "brand safety" in AI search?