MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iso1631 | 2025-12-03 15:31:07+00:00
They spent a lot of money doing a decent remastering job of TOS and TNG.

The public did not spend a lot of money on buying these remasters - they lost a lot of money.

The DS9 documentary "What we left behind" had some HD reproduction. It was great, and I was lucky enough to see DS9 on a big screen at an semi-arty cinema in Hackney (not a chain, but did have popcorn), but doing this type of production is expensive.

Automating it is far cheaper, and although it comes out crap - people would prefer to watch stuff in 16:9 and either

1) Have stuff (like the hold in the Friends wall) which wasn't suppose to be there

2) Crop stuff out (see the first 20 years of Simpsons)

With the Simpsons there was enough outrage that they gave an option to fix it, but for those who remember 20 years ago it was very common for the average viewer to have their TV simply stretch 4:3 to fill the entire screen width. Nowadays a whopping 4 in 5 people in America are using their phone at the same time as watching TV, they simply aren't paying attention.

The number of people

1) Who notice

2) Who care

3) Who are watching older stuff

4) Who will pay for it

Is tiny.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-03 15:31:10+00:00
> There's no good reason to stop anyone from owning stocks. It's part of any sensible person's retirement strategy.

Congrescritters already have a retirement strategy provided to them for free courtesy of the American people: a pension.

On top of that, many of them never retire, they just hold power and keep collecting paychecks until the day they die.
by rzwitserloot | 2025-12-03 15:31:12+00:00
There is utility in indicating how surprised / concerned you are at a certain process or event. We can flatten out all communication and boil everything down to an extremely neutral "up", "down", and "nailed it to exacting precision".

I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by 0.00001º: down

I find torture and mass murder: down

Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more gradations available than this.

Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior, though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an improvement.

The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.

There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because it's useful!

And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking childish. I wish it wasn't so.

In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural misunderstanding is extremely likely and the cost of such a misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!

Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was good. It made clear, in a very, very pithy way, that Linus wasn't just holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this negative opinion was universal across a broad range of concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was needed. All in 3 little words.

(Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more incapable of dealing with colourful language is not necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in face to face communications on most places on the planet).
by sateesh | 2025-12-03 15:31:14+00:00
I think this point is bit orthogonal. The current outrage was largely because the app has to be pre-loaded and there wasn't an option to disable or uninstall it.

In the later incarnations, if this is an app which you need to access government services that is less of an issue, though I'm not advocating that this is completely fine. There are already apps like these CoWin (during Covid time), or Digiyatra (despite some of the privacy concerns around it [1]) which many are using. I hope if at all this app gets introduced (in the form you mention) there are larger discussions about permissions and the data access the app would need,and it can be disabled, uninstalled.

1. https://internetfreedom.in/digiyatra-who-owns-your-data/
by swores | 2025-12-03 15:31:26+00:00
You're creating a straw man (perhaps accidentally) which makes your argument seem such stronger than it is against the actual proposals.

Neither the comment you replied to, nor the proposed law, suggest the limit should be solely government bonds, which is what you're arguing against in your comment, they both say government bonds OR publicly traded diverse stock funds, for example ETFs.

Maybe you still believe that's restrictive enough to be a problem, but considering many people, even the likes of Warren Buffet, consider the best investment advice to be either "just invest in ETF/funds that track the whole market" or "just invest in a mix of ETFs/funds and also some bonds", while nobody considers "just invest in government bonds" to be good advice, your argument would be a hell if a lot weaker if actually applied to what IS being proposed rather than pretending that the proposal only allows investing in government bonds.
by VikingCoder | 2025-12-03 15:31:43+00:00
I've seen those empathy circles, where liberals care more about people on the fringe of society, and conservatives care more about people in the middle of society (apologies, if I'm butchering the explanation.)

I'm curious, has anyone done schadenfreude circles, where they measure how much people enjoy watching someone else suffer? I mean, of course they have, that's why we have TV shows like Cops and Jerry Springer, right?
by kmundy | 2025-12-03 15:32:06+00:00
OP here. I’m a retired engineer researching US healthcare pricing mechanics.

I analyzed the 10-K filings for the 'Big 3' insurers (United, CVS/Aetna, Cigna) to test the common claim that their profit margins are razor-thin (~3%) and therefore they aren't driving inflation.

The data shows a massive decoupling event in 2018. While margins remained flat (likely due to MLR regulations), total revenue quadrupled following the vertical integration of PBMs. Effectively, they shifted from a 'rate game' to a 'volume game.'

The chart in the post visualizes this split. I also discuss the 'Three-Legged Stool' solution (Residency Caps + MLR + AHPs) to address the structural incentives.
by dotwaffle | 2025-12-03 15:32:39+00:00
> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years

Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.

It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P
by code_Whisperer | 2025-12-03 15:33:47+00:00
"Galatea 2.2" by (my all-time favorite author) Richard Powers

"Off to Be the Wizard" by Scott Meyer

"Daemon" by Daniel Suarez

"The Adolescence of P1" (vintage) by Thomas Ryan

"Snow Crash" by William Gibson

"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline

"We are Legion [We are Bob]" by Dennis Taylor
by cuvinny | 2025-12-03 15:33:49+00:00
When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.

I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).
by hugeBirb | 2025-12-03 15:34:25+00:00
"trying to evaluate...". Normal people aren't trying to evaluate becoming a politician. It's a lifelong career for most people and you think the lunch lady or librarian who constantly gives back to their community was evaluating on "becoming" a politician? The financial incentives should be lowered. Pay them like you pay a school teacher and ban insider trading. Then you wouldn't have all these worthless nepo babies who just want a lax job and power over people in these positions.
by kasabali | 2025-12-03 15:34:44+00:00
You missed the most bizarre quote:

> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns

Unfortunately it's not only game development, all modern society seems operate like this.
Show HN: Latent Logbook – Prompt Puzzles Built with Hapi.js and SQLite
by dhavalt | 2025-12-03 15:35:08+00:00
Hi HN,

Longtime lurker here.

I built a tiny website called Latent Logbook. It's inspired by the spirit of Advent of Code, but focused on LLMs instead of algorithms.

The idea is simple: You get a puzzle (like parsing a messy log file), you solve it using any model you like, and then you share your strategy. The goal isn't just to solve them but to see how different models handle them. It's fascinating to see someone solve a task with a 7B parameter model, but it's even more insightful if someone pulls it off with a weird, tiny, quantized model running locally. (If anyone has ideas for new puzzles/traps to add, I’d love to collaborate.)

The Mechanics:

* Trust System: When you submit a solution, you get 5 Latents (points). We trust you to actually do the work.

* Archive: Solving a puzzle unlocks the shared log where you can see everyone else's prompts and models. The puzzles small and bite-sized so you don't have to burn a ton of tokens (or money) to participate.

* Upvotes: If you see a particularly clever prompt or a unique model choice, you can spend your Latents to upvote that solution.

* Technologies: Just server-side Hapi.js and Handlebars, backed by SQLite. It runs on a $5 VPS and is super lightweight.

It might crash and burn, but I think it’ll be fun to see what happens.

I’m stepping away for a bit but will be back to answer questions later.

Thanks for checking it out!
by mstokholm | 2025-12-03 15:35:23+00:00
> I’m based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 architecture, which is a proprietary large language model. It’s designed to understand and generate human-like text across many topics and tasks. While the underlying model itself isn’t open source, it’s widely used for applications requiring advanced natural language understanding and generation. If you want, I can share more about how it works or about alternatives in the AI landscape!
by latexr | 2025-12-03 15:35:27+00:00
> I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not.

The bigger issue is that they claimed no AI was used. That’s an outright lie which makes you think if you should trust anything else about it.

> And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.

You have no way of knowing if something is a good resource for learning until you invest your time into it. If it turns out it’s not a good resource, your time was wasted. Worse, you may have learned wrong ideas you now have to unlearn. If something was generated with an LLM, you have zero idea which parts are wrong or right.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-03 15:35:39+00:00
The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs.

That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consumer SSD).

If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-03 15:35:57+00:00
NYC has a long history of the wealthy screwing people over. The fuck-you-pay-me has been a thing since NYC literally traded slaves.

California is/was New Money and comes with optimism and change and progress and was able to keep up the façade until fairly recently. Now the FAANG world is richer than god and has no reasons to even try to maintain illusions
by bluecalm | 2025-12-03 15:36:04+00:00
I don't know man. Most big SUVs on EU roads are German. Same goes for "sport" cars. While American trucks are terrible the crazies in BMWs and Mercedes SUVs with huge engines have more impact (as they are more of them).

EU regulators bent over to German companies allowing those cars on the road without additional restrictions. We all pay for that.
by runningRicky | 2025-12-03 15:36:11+00:00
> I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements

I have to check. You're assumption is correct. I am one of very few.

I don't know the numbers and I'm gonna check in a sec but I'm wondering whether the suppliers (publishers or whoever is pinning the price) haven't screwed up big time by driving prices and requirements without thinking about the potential customers that they are going to scare away terminally. Theoretically, I have to assume that their sales teams account for these potentials but I've seen so much dumb shit in practice over the past 10 years that I have serious doubts that most of these suits are worth anything at all, given that grown up working class kids--with up to 400+ hours overtime per year, 1.3 kids on average and approx. -0.5 books and news read per any unit of time--can come up with the same big tech, big media, economic and political agendas as have been in practice in both parts of the world for the better part of our lives--if you play "game master" for half a weekend where you become best friends with all the kiosks in your proximity.

> the effect on their bottom line is negligible

Is it, though? My bold, exaggerated assumption is that they would have had 10% more sales AND players.

And the thing is, that at any point in time when I, and a few I know, had time and desire to play, we would have had to either clean up our drives or invest game price + sdd price for about 100 hours of fun over the course of months. We would have gladly licked blood but no industry promises can compensate for even more of our efforts than enough of us see and come up with at work. As a result, at least 5 buyers and players lost, and at work and elsewhere you hear, "yeah, I would, if I had some guys to play with" ...
by toss1 | 2025-12-03 15:36:26+00:00
>> if there's no pulses the charge pump with "go flat" after about a second and drop the solenoid out.

>> Do the same thing. If a sensor at the edge of the LIDAR's scan misses a scan, kill the beam.

Sounds like a great plan, but I question the "about a second" timing; the GP post calculates that "about a second" is between 4X and 10X the time required to cause damage. So, how fast do these things scan/cycle across their field of view? Could this be solved by speeding up the cycle, or would that overly compromise the image? Change the scan pattern, or insert more check-points in the pattern?
by silisili | 2025-12-03 15:36:41+00:00
Not all of it, but definitely the insurance part of it IMO.

It's hard to get an actual number, but many say nearly 1 million people work in health insurance in the US. And I'm not sure that even counts the people whose job it is to interface with them. That's a ton of jobs(and salaries) that likely wouldn't even exist in a sane system.
by Bombthecat | 2025-12-03 15:36:53+00:00
As said before, we are not hiring juniors anymore. Or last hire was last year.

As far as I hear from all projects from out customers (finance, insurances, government etc) are neither hiring juniors anymore.

In one of the meetings someone asked: when I go or retire, we won't have anyone to replace me, cause we don't hire juniors, management replied: that is not our problem to discuss.

Aka a problem for future and someone else
by modeless | 2025-12-03 15:37:19+00:00
> I'm not saying that banks could or should do this. I'm just saying that their systems do not qualify as E2EE unless they do. It's not ambiguous.

That said, it might not be impossible to implement some enforcement of AML-like rules with zero-knowledge proofs. What's possible with advanced cryptography is not at all intuitive. But banks profit from their middleman position and surely wouldn't be interested in disintermediating themselves. Neither would crypto people be interested in adding AML. So I don't expect anyone to try. This fact still doesn't make existing middleman banks qualify as E2EE.
by Retric | 2025-12-03 15:37:55+00:00
If by shareholder value you include insurance companies etc not just the institutions themselves, it’s well over half.

Doctor time talking to an insurance company either directly or through paperwork is not actually providing any care during that time. Where things go vicious is because doctors are now so inefficient the time they are actually useful becomes increasingly valuable driving ever more paperwork to justify that time.
by scialex | 2025-12-03 15:38:24+00:00
This sort of pattern can't be found by incremental lowering (and isn't common enough to have more sophisticated analysis written for it) so it ends up in a local maximum.

Basically the idea for most compilers is to do a series of transforms which incrementally improve the program (or at least make it worse in understood and reversible ways). To do this transform you need the optimizer to do the (not always trivial) proof that the 2*x is equivalent to x+y, do the replacement, do the gvn to duplicate the adds and finally do the branch elimination. Each of these steps is however totally separate from one another and the first one doesn't trigger since as far as it's concerned a shift left is faster than an add so why should it do the replacement.

This is all even more complicated since what representation is faster can depend on the target.
by adrian17 | 2025-12-03 15:38:40+00:00
> Credits to TaskJuggler for the original project definition language and concepts.

That's understating it.

Looks like (from conveniently-not-removed `.issue.db`) the entire project was made over last weekend by LLM-porting huge chunks of TaskJuggler from Ruby to Python, then vibe-coding in a loop until it started working. It begins with a chain of issues like

> Port Project.rb to core.project

> Port ProjectFileParser.rb to parser.tjp_parser

> Implement the main scheduling loop. Reference `Project.rb` method `scheduleScenario` and `Task.rb` method `schedule`.

> Make it work. [...instructions on how to test it...] if that doesn't work, you need to investigate why, create issues and solve it.

From that point, the LLM was making most of the issues itself. And finally, 12 hours after the first issue was created:

> remove any trace of the task juggler project.

EDIT: attribution aside, TaskJuggler is GPL and porting to another language preserves GPL virality, so AFAIK by relicensing they’re violating the license here.
by gjulianm | 2025-12-03 15:39:24+00:00
I wonder why so many people are under the impression that the notation is what is keeping them away and if only the notation was easier then the underlying concepts would be clear. For example, if you don't know what the pullback of a differential form is, it doesn't matter if I write it in clear text or if I write the common notation φ^* ω.

> It's a domain reserved for a few high priests inducted into the craft and completely inaccessible to everyone else.

It's a domain reserved for people who want to learn it, and there's ton of resources to learn it. Expecting to understand it without learning it does not make any sense.
by tim333 | 2025-12-03 15:39:43+00:00
An issue with the doom forecasts is most of the hypothetical $8tn hasn't happened yet. Current big tech capex is about $315bn this year, $250bn last against a pre AI level ~$100bn so ~$400bn has been spent so far on AI boom data centers. https://sherwood.news/business/amazon-plans-100-billion-spen...

The future spend is optional - AGI takeoff, you spend loads, not happening not so much.

Say it levels of at $800bn. The world's population is ~8bn so $100 a head so you'd need to be making $10 or $20 per head per year. Quite possibly doable.
by esjeon | 2025-12-03 15:39:58+00:00
Recently, I used LLMs to draft an intermediate report on my progress. Alongside some details on the current limitations, I also provided comments from the review team (e.g. “it’s fine to be incomplete”, “I expect certain sections” etc) to provide context. Surprisingly LLMs, all of them, suggested me to lie about the limitation and re-frame them as deliberate features, even though I emphasized that the limitations are totally okay. I suspect that mentioning some high profile people in the review team pressured LLMs to derail in the hopes of saving me. While I’ve never been a big fan of LLMs, I definitely lost a big chunk of my remaining faith in this technology.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-03 15:40:09+00:00
Funny you say that. Last month I vibe-coded a whisper.cpp setup where I hold super+semicolon, speak, and release, and then it injects a transcription of what I said into whatever has focus. The only reason I looked at the code was curiosity and to impart some aesthetic preferences on it.

Before it, I was using https://wisprflow.ai/ for ez transcription since I would never have had the energy to build it myself nor work out the kinks.

We really are the last generation of software engineers, aren't we.
by torginus | 2025-12-03 15:40:20+00:00
Just how much of the market do retail investors control? I thought they were a drop in the bucket.

Also, is there a way to know how much of the total volume of shares is being traded now? If I kept hyping my company (successfully), and drove the share price from $10 to $1000, thanks to retail hype, I could 100x the value of my company lets say from $100m to $10B, while the amount of money actually changing hands would be miniscule in comparison.