skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I can tell, market theory assumes it's easy to enter a market or that people with money to spend somehow want to use it to compete knowing that they're doomed to drive the industry back to "normal profit." Nobody investing money actually wants to throw money at something that will obviously drive a return to normal profit by competing, and do so within a few years after significant capital expense. They want to invest in something that will drive margin growth. Instead, the only reason people do it is to get a buyout offer from established businesses in the same market. Unless you're Mark Cuban.

Though the above is only true to a point - obviously if the margins get high enough or product deviates sufficiently existing businesses with related interests will step in: witness Costco's chicken business.

So maybe the question is less why isn't there more competition and more so why haven't restaurants vertically integrated their potato supply? The main theory I'd have is that price increases haven't negatively impacted their margins or revenues sufficiently yet.
Learn ROS. It has tutorials using just turtle sim. Also https://www.theconstruct.ai/ is a place designed for people who want to learn robotics (based on ROS). https://www.youtube.com/@mikelikesrobots also has some nice beginner videos.
I think these things have potential to improve over time.

If nothing else I do like being able to get a relative quick explanation for how to change some obscure or minute functionality in the Windows OS.

Now, would it be better if the Win OS, by default wasn't obnoxiously in the way with the pretense of being "simpler"? Yes!

At least there are some truly free OS's out there that keep the interface consistent through iterations and generally improve overtime.
That would be like you sending the whole family to jail if one of them commits a crime. They are separate legal entities.
Qwen2.5-1M: Deploy your own Qwen with context length up to 1M tokens
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem prover."

-- Richard O'Keefe
The reason that is the issue is because that is not something they actually need to do. It's something the investors want but not generally required as they expect an exit of some sort.
Just to be clear, though, the F-14 was retired in 2006, right?
What is also interesting (and troubling to see) is all the AI influencers panicing and inventing conspiracy theories downplaying the engineering achievements of the team behind Deepseek. Catching up is always easier than cruising by having started from scratch.
Your argument is that no one person can build a whole cargo container ship, hence cargo container ships are intelligent? The whole of humanity cannot build from scratch a working human digestive track, hence human digestive track is more intelligent than all of humanity?

Things can be complex without being intelligent.
The thing you are suggesting is jailing every adult American with a 401k when a corporation misbehaves.

You say that shouldn't be taboo, it should be debatable. Alright, I'm listening, tell me how that wouldbsolve more problems than it would create.
The problem is that only 0.01% of the people who need to be held accountable are. The number isn’t zero, clearly, but how many of the people who caused the 2008 disaster ended up in prison? My point exactly.

I also think it’s clear that SBF was jailed for his effects on the rich rather than on average people. Worse than fleecing billionaires, he made them look bad. Clearly he’s a scumbag who deserves prison time, but people worse than him are free.
Two general debugging lessons to note here: (1) Data watchpoints are a lifesaver that should be in your toolbox. (2) When something funky is happening to a data structure in a C program, look at its address to see if it’s in the stack or the heap, in case the answer is a surprise.
That's not actually true. Wage theft is maybe third: https://truthnotoutrage.com/2023/12/05/retail-theft-dwarfs-w...

By all indicia, shoplifting is a much bigger problem. I know this myth and wage theft in general are really popular on social media. I think its lacking of representation in traditional media and prosecution is a mix of how much more clear-cut shoplifting is and just the victims report it more.
Right, obviously man/child is on par with man himself.

I’m obviously talking about something on par with man himself but isn’t a man or even human. It is something else.
It's the userland that always sends me back to Linux. I've tried BSD a few times, but there are enough gnu flags in my muscle memory for command line utilities that it's painful.
Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off.

I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
> However what are the realistic implications of this ruling for potential future cases?

In future cases, rightsholders alleging DMCA liability will have to produce stronger evidence that a hoster knew about specific infringing user-uploaded content yet didn't remove it. Interacting with what might be infringing content, telling employees/users that using copyrighted content might be infringing (shocker, but this rightsholder really went for that one), and having the discretion to remove infringing content are not enough to establish that the hoster had actual knowledge of specific infringing user-uploaded content.

> How is challenging DMCA 1201 going?

Poorly, if you're referring to Green v. Department of Justice [1]. The EFF lost that case, and I'm not aware of whether they will appeal that particular case.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/second-circuit-rejects...
Every year, I run the numbers to see how many years it will take for going completely off grid (to avoid paying for prior and current corruption at PG&E) to pay for itself.

Every year, it decreases.
So you argument is that Chinese AI companies are less biased because they have access to tightly controlled Chinese internet data?

Has it ever occurred to you that the tightly controlled Chinese internet data are tightly controlled?

Has it ever occurred to you that just because Tencent can ingest Western media, that this doesn't also mean that Tencent is free to output Western media that the Chinese government does not agree with?

Please go back to school and study harder, you have disappointed me. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE.
I guess Proton/Wine/Linux gaming wasn't mature enough back then. Also a handheld wasn't really an option because there weren't any powerful enough yet energy efficient and cheap x86 chips available either.
The battery thing can be important. One strategy law enforcement uses is to force your phone into a high energy state and zap the battery very quickly.
Well, it used to be a crime to offer a communication service without government explicit approval.

But an app like Skype made it possible for people to communicate for free. Was it bad? Do we need government to define what kind of business people can conduct?
Nvidia Stock May Fall as DeepSeek's 'Amazing' AI Model Disrupts OpenAI
This reminds me a lot of Datasette.io. See example power plant data: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...
I’m pretty sure there is funding on both sides; NIH vs DARPA for example. I suspect that NIH funds a lot more here and I’m skeptical that DARPA funds labs in China for this.

The experiments WIV were doing were specifically targeted at identifying wild-type viruses that could cross over. This is not where you would start for a bioweapon. (Unless, tinfoil hat, you want to start a pandemic that looks like a zoonotic event. But that’s not the threat model the US military is worried about in the research they fund.)
That would violate the Cosmological principle - the idea that viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers. Also the Copernican principle - the idea that our observation point in the universe is pretty average and not overly special.

Of course both of these principles aren't strongly supported by evidence. They are still usually assumed because they keep cosmology sane and verifiable.
Not if they're cramming them as close as they can go to make space. As soon as they pushed the first ones off, more landed.

> Immediately, five more airborne Huey pilots took advantage of the cleared runway to land and disembark their passengers.

Basically, the situation in the pic at https://www.forcesnews.com/news/uss-theodore-roosevelt-chang..., but with aircraft instead of cars.

They were all gonna wind up scrapped or sent to the boneyard (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_040204-N-312...) anyways.
Yes. I see this kind of "if your lock is easy to pick and your house is robbed, it's not the burglar's fault" argument a lot -- it's the lock-maker's fault! It's your fault for not doing enough research on locks! Or more commonly on HN, it's the fault of too much regulation somehow? -- and, it's like, okay, all of those factors may be worth considering, but the burglar still made a conscious decision to rob you. The burglary is not some inevitable consequence of systemic failure. If somebody leaves their laptop on a bar top for a few minutes to go to the bathroom and you steal it, "hey, they left it there" is not some kind of magic get out of jail free card for you. You chose to steal it.

And, yep: if four companies that control 97% of their market conspire to fix prices together, they are making a conscious decision to do so. There may be systemic failures which make it easier for them to do that than there should be, but they're still choosing to do it knowing that it's wrong. I'd go so far as to say that they're actually counting on people pointing the finger anywhere but at them. It's not us, it's just inflation! It's not us, it's the Biden administration! It's not us, it's something something something Covid! Yeah, okay, but at the end of the day, you're consciously choosing to price gouge.

Doctorow's point is, I think, that companies are deflecting from this by saying "it's not us, it's the apps, man! They're telling us what the optimal prices are, and we're just following their command!" But that's still, at the end of the day, price-fixing. It's _outsourced_ price-fixing, but it's still price-fixing.
Ask HN: Best approach for an offline LLM assistant for 3 high school subjects
I want build an offline tutor/assistant specifically for 3 high school subjects. It has to be a tiny but useful model because it will be locally on the mobile phone, i.e. absolutely offline.
For each of the 3 high school subjects, I have the syllabus/curriculum, the textbooks, practice questions and plenty of old exam papers and answers. I would want to train the model so that it is tailored to this level of academics. I would want the kids to be able to have their questions explained from the knowledge in the books and within the scope of the syllabus. If possible, kids should be able to practice exam questions if they ask for it. The model can either fetch questions on a topic from the past and practice questions, or it can generate similar questions to those ones. I would want it to do more, but these are the requirements for the MVP.
I am fairly new to this, so I would like to hear opinions on the best approach.
What model to use?
How to train it. Should I use RAG, or a purely generative model? Is there an inbetween that could work better?
What are the challenges that I am likely to face in doing this and any advice on the potential workarounds?
Any other advise that you think is good is most welcome.
Show HN: FixProxy – Browse the Web with Privacy
Hello, a month ago I've submitted a post about FixBrowser, a lightweight web browser written from scratch. As part of the project there is also a FixProxy tool that allows to browse the web with privacy using an exising web browser.

FixProxy is it's own project with a different usage. It is also practical to use (unlike FixBrowser in it's current form), I've been using it for multiple years with good results.

Since the last post I've been working on various improvements that are incorporated in the linked blog post. But you can also read about them in more detail in this blog post: https://www.fixbrowser.org/blog/fixbrowser-0.2

The project also has GitHub page now: https://github.com/jezek2/fixbrowser
Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
In town gas, yes. But that was until the 70s. The first climate change treaty was only signed in 1994. No-one wants to go back to town gas. I don't think it burned cleaner, it was made from coal. And it contained CO, which is lethal. I mention it merely as an existence proof that it's possible to ship hydrogen. I don't personally think it will be economic to do so without compromising climate goals, except as a tool to mitigate the carbon consumption of existing appliances.
It was all part of Microsoft 365 already; Copilot just adds the AI slop.
Love it! Especially the generated png summary.

One suggestion for “unsupervised”/“unlabelled” ML scenarios like this is to give 3 choices and let user pick the one most meaningful to them.

For example, my daughter’s name is Alba. It went with “white” as primary translation and gave 白 (Bai2) but felt 小白 was a little too on the nose lol.

I changed the input to be “Dawn” (another meaning of the name) and got a somewhat better result of 晨.

Might be nice to provide an extra descriptor word too.

Still very cool and wish I had this when I lived in China. I went with the transliteration of my name: 安德斯 (Anders). Regret that I didn’t get one more meaningful!

Two nits: 1) I want to see the history of names I’ve previously generated 2) in the png, the headings on each side are different but I imagine the content is the same just a different language? I.e. “Character meanings” vs “character analysis”
That’s because the alternative is worse.
Politicians don’t exist in a vacuum. People are to blame too. So are business owners.
> The government needs to step in actively to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states.

Which is what, exactly? The US is per capita richer than almost all EU countries by a huge margin (with a few small exceptions mostly enabled by regulatory arbitrage targeting US money), so forgive me if I don't take your seething commentary about the US economic apparatus very seriously.
More like "not a crime if a cartel of corporations does it" - not so sure it has much to do with an "app".

Useful analysis of consolidation and resulting price increases due to "inflation", even if the title could use re-wording.

Interesting that -- especially in an election cycle -- the government is blamed for "inflation", whereas a large contributing factor -- and the main one in this case -- are companies which control a market segment leveraging opportunities (COVID supply chain breakdowns, etc.) to increase their profits at the expense of the Average Joe.

We recently had to do a shower remodel. The salesperson told us that the price was 50% higher now than it was pre-pandemic. Prices shot up during the pandemic due to the known supply chain issues, but never went back down even after those supply chain issues are resolved.

Another good example of this are road bikes (I'm a cyclist): You could get a nice carbon bike for $2500 before the pandemic. Now it's $5000 for essentially the same thing. This is not explained by supply chain issues or an increase in the money supply.
It's hard to think of situations where you don't want to do the sorting on the DB. If you're sorting small numbers of rows it's cheap enough that it doesn't matter, and if you're sorting large numbers of rows you should be using an index which makes it vastly more efficient than it could be in your app.

And if your conditional logic is breaking the optimizer then the solution is usually to write the query more correctly. I can't think of a single instance where I've ever found moving conditional logic out of a query to be meaningfully more performant. But maybe there's a specific example you have in mind?
Exactly - theres a lot of stuff that if an individual/small business owner did, they'd be personally onerously fined or jailed.. but corporations get a pass. Corporations also have a lot of money to pay good lobbyists & lawyers such that laws are pretty forgiving, loopholes are found & exploited, and finally they are vigorously defended if the government ever does try to crack down.

Ubers behavior during its growth phase, and even now is a good example of this. The latest letter of the law vs spirit of the law thing Uber did was circumvent the NYC law to try and ensure Uber drivers get a fair minimum wage.

To avoid having to pay any difference to make up the hourly wage to drivers, Uber runs an algorithm which kicks drivers out of the app randomly if demand gets too low, without warning or indication of when they can get back in. It can be minutes or hours. So the drivers remain on the road, driving/idling, waiting to get back into the app. The "work" is still getting done, but it doesn't count against Uber.

Imagine a small restaurant doing similar, deciding at random slow times instead of sending staff home for the day, they assign them no tables and mark them as off-the-clock. When demand picks up again, they get assigned some tables and resume making money.

The whole independent contractor on-demand app market is an automated exploitation engine.
Based on my personal testing for coding, I still found Claude Sonnet is the best for coding and its easy to understand the code written by Claude (I like their code structure or may at this time, I am used to Claude style).
How do you know that lacked intent? It just sounds like cover for intent
I’m not proposing that at all. False dichotomy. Is it possible that there is a reasonable middle ground somewhere between “shield everyone involved in corporate wrongdoing” and “send every investor to jail?”
Also the Rus were Norse warlords who conquered those lands.
Ask HN: What's the best way to code a complicated project from scratch using AI?
Using chatgpt (paid) and Claude (free):

When I try to code a somewhat complex project (backend with login capabilities, jwt, refreshtoken, and e2e tests) and I put all the requirements in the initial prompt, the output is usually condensed and incomplete, like it has a maximum output length that it can't exceed.

When I give it small prompts, I get more verbose and complete answers, but the prompts seem to forget the previous prompts, and throw out logic that was written previously.

What's the best way to feed instructions to these AI systems for relatively complex projects?
We did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer. They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on a monthly basis).
That was really funny, thanks for sharing
I don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.
We are not under normal economic constraints when we have the most money per capita on the face of the earth. The financial capital to do this exists.

I’m baffled at how you think it’s not economically possible when it completely it is. How does Tokyo even exists if it’s not economically possible?? It’s possible it’s just we can’t do it due to incompetence.

Just look at the high speed rail in California. That is a framed picture of American incompetence.
It's not really clear that the situation that has been in place since WW2 that was mainly due to the destruction of Europe and Europe and America's intentional underdevelopment of the rest of the world is a situation that will persist. Most likely the new world will be multi-polar, which has its own challenges but also opportunities.
The thing is though, a bridge with large cracks in it hasn't fallen down. You can always reinforce it and then it doesn't fall down.

Same is true for the US. If the elected officials and their hired civil servants actually went around reinforcing the US then we're fine. If they continue to neglect the decaying roads, neglect the growing trusts, and etc then the bridge will collapse.
hacker news discovers literary devices
Can your corner store credit be used to pay taxes? How long will your corner store survive if the IRS found out you were processing transactions in your own currency?
Note that the results will differ between compositors, different GPUs, and different configurations. This is somewhat less the case with X11 since there is only one X server implementation (that Linux desktop systems use, anyhow.)

I think there may still be the issue that many compositor/GPU combinations don't get hardware cursor planes, which would definitely cause a latency discrepancy like this.
This is probably compositor specific, so I wonder if this is a mutter issue or if it can be replicated in kwin.
The same one that makes price fixing illegal.

Go look up price fixing, and tell me why that statute wouldn't apply here, if you remain unconvinced.
considering it's not a bsd nor it's trying to be like one, that question doesn't make a lot of sense?
Are you referring to the distilled models?
In some cases, the answer is "use some of that money you're raking in to bribe competitors not to compete". https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforceme...
Ya, the phrase "first principles" is vague...I meant starting from an axiomatic and actionable definition of AI and learning from there. The first chapter of AIMA does a swell job of enumerating different definitions of and then explicitly declaring which one is used and the foundational premises for the concepts and methods to follow. And it doesn't define AI then jump to neural networks, it gradually layers more atomic concepts, like agents (which I know, have been bastardized) and environments, until it gets to machine learning.

> The other big question is why you want to learn it.

Good question. I'm just looking for a wider context to understand contemporary AI. I don't know if this serves any practical purpose but I'm someone who likes to understand the "why" behind everything and starting from "first principles" helps uncover that.
This is a fancy word for “being human in a hostile and duplicitous world.”

There is a real cognitive cost to knowing everything is invalid but being disallowed to say it is this because then one is contributing to “a morale problem.” The weight of all the emotional labor is why most people can’t climb the corporate ladder, as the intellectual demands of office work are basically zero. Normally it is only autistic people who struggle with this cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, but since 2020 it has been basically everyone. The fact that our world is run by terrible people who will probably not go away until removed violently is one of those things no one can talk about, but everyone knows.
Context ain't free. The larger your project becomes, the more money you will spend trying to infer code from it. It's possible that the cost of writing complex code with AI exponentially correlates to the complexity of the working codebase.
Fair enough that it has that meaning more generally in biology. My point is 100% of the policy discussions about it are referring to that particular subset—no one means producing insulin when they talk about the risks of GoF.
Yeah, thanks, but it's Hypernormalization.

By chance (or the algo realizing I read HN) I watched an interesting edit of Adam Curtis explaining the term on Youtube too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI
what's the different with for example Cursor?