MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by woodruffw | 2025-04-22 19:37:47+00:00
With my Homebrew hat on, but not speaking for others: I think this is pretty cool, and demonstrates something that we've discussed indirectly for years.

At its core, there are really two parts to Homebrew:

1. There's the client side, i.e. `brew`, which 99.9% of users stick to happy paths (bottle installs, supported platforms) within. These users could be supported with relative ease by a small native-code installer, since the majority of the work done by the installer in the happy path is fetching bottles, exploding them, and doing a bit of relocation.

2. There's literally everything else, i.e. all of the developer, repository, and CI/CD machinery that keeps homebrew-core humming. This is the largely invisible infrastructure that makes `brew install` work smoothly, and it's very hard to RIIR (in a large part because it's tied heavily to the formula DSL, which is arbitrary Ruby).

(1) is a nice experimental space, because Homebrew does (IMO) a decent job of isolating the client-facing side from the complexity of (2). However, (2) is where the meat-and-potatoes of packaging happens, and where Homebrew's differentiators really lie (specifically, in how easy it is to contribute new packages and bump existing ones).

Edit: Another noteworthy aspect here around performance: I mentioned this in another comment[1], but parallel downloads of things like bottles and DMGs is not an architectural limitation of Homebrew itself, but instead a conscious decision to trade some install speed for courtesy towards the services we fetch from (including GitHub itself). Smaller projects can sidestep this because they're not directing nearly the same degree of volume; I think this project will discover if/when its volumes grow that it will need to serialize downloads to avoid being throttled or outright limited.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43765605
by j45 | 2025-04-22 19:38:23+00:00
I don't mind the idea of BYO hardware, especially if it's an old server with hotswap drive and hotswap power built in.

Increasingly, with the time I have towards the things that interest me, I just want storage and a bit of compute to be like a home appliance, reasonably set and forget it and leave my messing around on a USFF computer.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-22 19:38:25+00:00
This is why I switched as well. At that point the brew experience was a lot closer to that of apt on a Debian-based Linux distribution or something where you could reliably run “x install <pkgname>”, get up to go grab coffee, and come back to a useable newly installed package. Macports felt like it could throw errors because Venus was in retrograde sometimes.
by dijit | 2025-04-22 19:38:45+00:00
I say this from ignorance, but coming from a lineage of linux package managers; brew must be doing something wrong - and upon immediate introspection I doubt that its language specific.

The performance of apt/dnf in comparison is surreal; but dnf (or at least yum, its predecessor) is written in Python; which has even worse performance characteristics than Ruby.

Clearly something is wrong, I wonder how different they are architecturally.
by RedNifre | 2025-04-22 19:40:11+00:00
Your ideas sound a lot like those of the APPD, the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany: They advocate to "balkanize" Germany into three zones:

- Asozial Parasite Zone: For lazy punks who don't like to work

- Safe Business Zone: For hard working people who really like work

- Violence Experience Parks: For Nazis and other violent folks (like your Mad Max enthusiasts)

See here, you might enjoy it: http://www.appd-hessen.de/index_dateien/appd_grundsatzprogra...
by dragontamer | 2025-04-22 19:40:30+00:00
I built one a few years ago. I never published it or anything but I figure it's worth a discussion point here.

1. Multiply is a primitive that seems to mix the most bits in the fewest clock ticks.

2. Multiply's weakness is that the bottom bits have almost no mixing at all. This is easily fixed with bit-reverse, which is implemented in one clock tick on both NVidia and AMD GPUs. X86 can use bswap instead. ARM has bit reverse.

3. Finding the best 32-bit constant to multiply is the hard part. Until you remember that GPUs can search the entire 32-bit space in less than a miliseconds. (4-Billion numbers across 2GHz and about 4000 shaders so like 8000x 32-bit space traversals per second).

4. The RNG is therefore defined as #3, what kind of searches and heuristics do you optimize for?

5. I chose to calculate the pop count(change of bits) and optimized for the largest number of popcnt==16 bitflips, which is a weird definition of the avalanche effect but hey I needed something. Popcnt is also a one-click tick instruction.

6. The remaining effort is an exercise left for the reader. But it took me like 2 days, it's not hard.

7. EDIT: Remember the lessons from XORShift. Have a simple counter (ex: state++) combined with a reversible hash-like function (ex: return hash(state++);). The above discussion is mostly about the hash. State++ function is anything that trivially cycles the 32-bit or 64-bit space for maximum cycle length. I find that state+=(odd number) is a superior mixer that still trivially traverses the whole space. Use above discussion to search for optimal constant.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-22 19:40:41+00:00
I've been working my way towards a biololgy degree very slowly (can only really fit one-class-at-a-time alongside working full time). I'm maybe 70% to a bachelor's degree in it. Been writing code for ages, but I've saved enough to accept a lower salary if it means I get to work on a real problem for once in my life. So I guess I'm one of those people you're frustrated with.

Do you have any advice for how to not be that kind of problem? For now I'm just focusing on my coursework, but at some point I'll be biologist-enough to help out with research. How do I approach it without being that guy?
by myk9001 | 2025-04-22 19:40:52+00:00
> Just the production of the code is different.

Just like you, I think prompting LLMs to produce code for us is the future of the profession. Not necessarily a fan, this is just how I see the reality of it. The person I'm replying to feels this ruins the profession for them, if I'm reading their comment right. Hence the question.

Edit: Oh, you're the post's author. Thanks for sharing and I hope the business is going strong.
by j45 | 2025-04-22 19:41:12+00:00
Synology did a good job of being relatively turnkey.

QNAP has more configurability for better and worse.

Curious ot hear what other manufactures can compare to them out of the box.

Self-configuring something is a different thing.

I simply do not care any more to rebuild raids and manually swap drives under duress when something is going down. I just replace existing drives with new ones well before they die after they've hit enough years. Backblaze's report is incredibly valuable.
by kelafoja | 2025-04-22 19:41:30+00:00
> A procedual implementation will necessarily have the same essential complexity as the regex it replaces

I don't think I fully agree with this, and I don't see a basis for why this should be true. If I have a very specific implementation, it could have very little incidental complexity, it could be fully targeted to the use case. Whereas with regular expressions there is incidental complexity of the regex engine itself by definition.
by j45 | 2025-04-22 19:42:15+00:00
QNAP's ecosystem is decent. There is a third party store by a former QNAP employee that has a lot more selection in it.

Getting a lower powered intel celeron QNAP nas basically lets you run anything you want software or app wise, including docker that just works instead of hunting for ARM64 binaries for anything that is not available off the shelf.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-22 19:42:20+00:00
Have you tried Homebrew in the last year or so? I think a lot of people have an impression of Homebrew's performance from the "bad old days," i.e. back when Homebrew had to evaluate every single local formula file to perform any operations at all.

(There's still low handing fruit, but it's not like it was a few years ago where `brew list` took seconds to run. It now runs nearly instantaneously for me locally, like most of the other happy path commands.)
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-22 19:42:28+00:00
Loved his book "Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.161.3844.874

which had a great description of the activities of his rocket club while the Nazis were closing in. At some point the police shut them down because "somebody might get hurt" but somebody from the rocket club convinced the authorities that this was a feature and not a bug and pretty soon they were spirited away to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usedom

and the rest was history. Increasingly though my favorite prophet of the space age is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky

because he figured out pretty much everything about space travel based on the kinetic theory of gases and the conservation of momentum and energy without building a single piece of hardware.
by jerf | 2025-04-22 19:43:27+00:00
I'll cop to the word "viable" doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but I have not yet seen a dependent typing system that is adequate for engineering work. There are research systems, yes, and there are many people doing laudable work on it, but when people on HN pine for "dependent type systems", I think they're talking about wanting to live in a world where most people who are programming today are instead programming in dependently-typed systems happily and productively, not a world where all programmers not functioning at a PhD-candidate level are evicted from the profession because they can't handle proof languages.

Or, to put it another way, there is no dependently-typed language I can even consider saying to my manager "Hey, you asked me to do X and I think I'll use language Y which is dependently typed", and as far as I can see, the problem isn't just that "nobody has built the standard library for it yet" or any thing else, the problem boils down to, they just aren't easy enough to use to call them practical.

I'd also say that "hey, you can use this dependently-typed language, just don't try to actually use the dependently-typed features" is also not what people are pining for.
by j45 | 2025-04-22 19:44:17+00:00
Western Digital misrepresented their Red drives being as suitable for NAS as they advertised, which ended up with them receiving a class action lawsuit against them.

Luckily all of the settings can be searched for and verified.

Seagate and Hitachi have seemed to treat me well over the years and I was giving WD a chance.

Next drives to buy will be from this list: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...
by pron | 2025-04-22 19:45:00+00:00
> The class of code I'm referring to is more like those you already mention in your JEP: logging, tracing, profiling, serialization, authn/authz, mocking, ffi, and so on. I would describe all of those as fitting under the umbrella of "cross-cutting" and needing a "meta-programming" facility.

Those are traditionally offered in Java in the form of bytecode transformation rather than AST transformations, as the notion of "compile time" in Java is not as clear as it is in, say, Zig; Project Leyden will make it even more vague, as it will allow caching JIT output from one run to the next.

> Can I discuss this further with you in a more appropriate venue than this forever thread?

Sure, you can email me at the email address I use on the JDK mailing lists (e.g. loom-dev).
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-22 19:45:07+00:00
> I think OP mentions this due to your mention of meteor impacts

I thought I was pretty clear about the strikes being in North America, but ill emphasize that point again. The formation is natural and the theory is that human settled in it for its logistical and defensive advantages (back when the area around it was lush), and then got wiped out by floods caused by global climate shifts caused by massive meteorite strikes in North America and possibly the Atlantic ocean.

> According to Wikipedia, Stone Age axes. It seems reasonable to believe that the site provided easy access for material

Sure, but given how little investment has been made into archeological studies of the area, isn't it interesting that we found evidence of some significant human activity?

It doesn't prove the theory, but its an observation that if anything lends to the theory.

The scientific method is a process of making observations, developing a theory, forming falsifiable hypotheses, testing them carefully, and then drawing conclusions, and updating the theory as appropriate.

I don't take issue with people being skeptical about all this, I just take issue with people confidently stating that it's been proven false. Their stance seems less scientific to me than the people who want to pursue experiments that validate or invalidate (or refine) the theory.

I for one just would like to know the truth, whatever it might be.

Edit: To the people who are downvoting this comment, I wish you would respond to it and explain why you think it deserves to be downvoted.
Show HN: Bring Local LLMs to Life and Build Anything (Free and Demo Video)
by araldhafeeri | 2025-04-22 19:45:26+00:00
I was frustrated. I had multiple local LLMs sitting idle—why bother when cloud models with more parameters are better?

On top of that, every tool out there that lets you build with LLMs is absurdly overpriced.

So I built what I needed: a completely free, local-first AI platform that actually unlocks the power of local models.

This isn’t just another agent. It has a key innovation many smart folks in AI missed:

Most AI agents just use tools to chase human-defined goals.

This one creates its own goals, subgoals, and tools on the fly.

The tool is on another level when you use more parameter LLM, the performance with a 32B LLM is way better than16B LLM, you'll see at least a 100x performance gain.

And yes—it runs entirely locally. Completely free.

Project: https://github.com/ARAldhafeeri/whale-rider

Demo Video: https://youtu.be/ciFfjajS_xA?si=NQt5DStF1BS3m4Fj
by Feynuus | 2025-04-22 19:45:30+00:00
I had always thought of biology as 'less rigorous' than the other sciences, and consequently less deserving of merit than, say, physics (my major). Less mathematical, not as rigorous, purely memorization devoid of deep understanding,.

It took me a while to shed that view.

1. There's an inherent charm and beauty to biology, and the ability to memorise is a skill.

2. The many different sub-disciplines of biology demonstrate the level of complexity that the field demands. And, even if it isn't as 'rigorous' as physics, do we denounce experimentalists because theoretical physicists exist? They simply serve as distinct, but crucial, parts of a chain.
by hdjjhhvvhga | 2025-04-22 19:45:45+00:00
It's shocking how much American soft power diminished in such a short period. White House documents used to mean something, had a certain weigh, whereas now some of them are simply ridiculous. This one in particular is not particularly bad even. Although we know who inspired it and that, given the fact that DeepSeek made their models available and OpenAI didn't, whatever is written should be taken with more than one grain of salt.
by scottmcf | 2025-04-22 19:46:08+00:00
> This is a good point to me as a parent -- in a world where this becomes a precious toy, it would be a serious risk of emotional pain if the child experienced this scenario like the death of a pet or friend.

We've already seen this exact scenario play out with "Moxie" a few months ago:

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/moxie-kids-robot-shuts-down
by e-topy | 2025-04-22 19:47:01+00:00
I only wanted to use Smalltalk as an example of a message oriented language. Even then, every IO and every message-based communication is non-blocking and async, therefore programs have much higher throughput (if designed correctly, the same could be said for C++, but the effort to do so is much, much lesser in languages like Elixir/Erlang than C++, and in most situation comes for free).
by bovermyer | 2025-04-22 19:48:24+00:00
There is nothing wrong with people wanting to just be able to afford food, shelter, and comfort.

However, if people are writing software that other people rely on, there has to be some expectation of quality. Software that controls a machine responsible for keeping someone alive, for instance, should function reliably.

Relying on AI to vibe-code such software is dangerous at best.
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-04-22 19:48:45+00:00
That spec aligns with my understanding, including the model's dependence on comfort perception. I was, initially, in disbelief about it, but changed my mind after reading thru. The texty reply was to make it more palatable for someone like me to accept. I think we agree.

One thing I missed in summary is the concept of general radiant temperature gradient. It's not only about the gradient for conduction, but for radiation (and convection). So you could probably improve my summary by talking about any gradient between different objects in the environment and their EM, which feels unpleasant (but I think it had value in its reduction of the problem, too).
by PennRobotics | 2025-04-22 19:48:46+00:00
If you use a shotgun for this sort of thing, there's not a high risk of serious injury---particularly if you obey gun safety standards e.g. identifying everything in line with your target to the full range of your ammo.

The interesting theoreticals happen when a drone has a legitimate purpose (a drone owned by the county used for property appraisal, law enforcement, control of invasive species, etc.) or when someone causes serious harm/damage to a third party or even starts a fire from a falling drone.

Per Florida legislation: Reasonable expectation of privacy means circumstances under which a reasonable person would believe that he or she could fully disrobe in privacy, without being concerned that the person’s undressing was being viewed, recorded, or broadcasted by another---inside a house, bathroom, changing room, dressing room, tanning booth, etc.

(They keep falling back on 'reasonable'. I'm not sure I could describe the border between a reasonable and unreasonable person.)
by alexykn | 2025-04-22 19:48:48+00:00
Building from source, obviously, will never be really that much more performant as it mainly relies on the underlying build systems and things like ninja, cmake, cargo etc. are usually optimized very very well.

Thanks to rust just being (slightly, significantly? no idea about ruby's speed) faster + concurrent downloading & pouring of bottles, most "regular" formula installs feel a good bit faster than brew already. Mainly noticeable when installing multiple formulae at once.

Casks, especially those with pkg installers, seem to profit a bit less here.

Performance was a reason, not the main one though, like I said I wanted and still want, to build a declarative package + system managing solution on top. The idea was to get into rust with that. Imo having the base written in the same language instead of wrapping commands also gives more flexibility there.

Another reason is that I never liked the way brew looks and feels. Right now the ui/ux for Sapphire is far from finished, more like a clusterf*k and only the search command really looks the way I want it. Aiming for something modern, clean and information rich without beeing overly verbose. I really like dnf5 and what AerynOS is doing and will probably take some inspiration there.

Like mentioned, Bottles and Casks should be 100% doable and that would cover most package needs on macOS, I do not see why I should also define a new repo and packaging ecosystem when such a big and popular one exists.

Source build capability will probably stay(for easy integration of source building in the system management part later) but not be focused on brew formulae as the ruby dsl would be a horror to parse.

Well and sh*t I am not trying to compete really. This is the first time building something with rust and I really really had no idea what a giant never ending rabbit hole macOS package management is and how massive and complex Brew is.

This went from should I to can I pretty quick for me xD
Show HN: AI app to enhance photos, videos, and PDFs locally
by mofu_dev | 2025-04-22 19:48:48+00:00
I built a desktop app that enhances photos, short videos, and scanned PDFs using AI. It runs entirely on your computer — no upload or internet connection is required — so it works well for personal or sensitive files.

It uses local models for upscaling, denoising, and restoring old or compressed media. Right now it's available only for Windows due to limited development time, though I develop it on Linux and plan to support more platforms later.

I made this for people who want to clean up old images and videos without sending them to the cloud.

Free trial available. Feedback appreciated!
by woodruffw | 2025-04-22 19:48:55+00:00
FWIW: a longstanding limitation for parallel downloads within Homebrew isn't architectural (it's not too hard to add!) but structural with respect to Homebrew's download sources: GitHub and others are very gracious with the amount of traffic we send their way, and we don't want to overtax services that have other major consuming parties.

(This is a perverse countereffect: small projects can make performance decisions that Homebrew and other larger projects can't make, because they don't have a large install base that reveals the limitations of those decisions.)
by marginalia_nu | 2025-04-22 19:49:17+00:00
When I read the dialogue, I never got the feeling it was intended as a historical account, heck the same goes for the socratic dialogues in general. They're mostly a vehicle for philosophical discussion.

Like are we also giving Plato's account of the afterlife the same credibility?

He's also pulling in characters from a fairly large timespan, some of which (e.g. Parmenides) are unlikely to have unlikely to have overlapped with Socrates' active years.
by meindnoch | 2025-04-22 19:50:57+00:00
>Except some radiation does leave, evidently

Well, not evidently. Rather, theoretically. We don't have any evidence of this whatsoever, but quantum field theory predicts that it should happen. On the other hand, we don't have a unified theory of quantum physics and general relativity, so it may well turn out to be pure fantasy; an artifact of the intersection of two incomplete theories.
by gh02t | 2025-04-22 19:51:07+00:00
Depends on your skill level. TrueNAS is pretty great at core NAS functionality and its apps situation is also pretty good now that it's stabilizing after working through some growing pains, but it's also not as easy to use as Synology. I've used it for years (since it was still called FreeNAS) and personally wouldn't consider anything else. They offer their own hardware that is not badly priced, or you can load it up for free on your own generic DIY hardware (which will typically save you quite a few bucks over buying any all-in-one solution). Unraid is another good option for DIY that is easier to learn, though not free. Rolling your own from scratch on top of Debian or something also isn't particularly difficult if you're experienced with Linux, and running apps through Docker with something like Portainer.

For more direct competitors to Synology in terms of maximum easy user experience there are some decent options out there like QNAP, ASUStore, etc. Youtube is a good place to look for reviews that go in depth to compare.