MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sedatk | 2025-04-22 23:38:38+00:00
> 1. This is specifically designed for portable hardware with minimal controls - not general-purpose programming.

I don't understand why portable hardware warrants a new programming model. What does make C such a significantly worse candidate for the examples given in the article?

> 2. Like music trackers, unfamiliarity makes it look complex, but the rules are simple and consistent once learned.

Columns and rows in tracker music have specific meanings: each column corresponds to a channel, and each row corresponds to a point in time. Not in this case. In this layout, columns are arbitrary, and their meaning changes every row. Rows don't have any more meaning than regular code. I don't think they're equivalent.
by retrac | 2025-04-22 23:38:41+00:00
They do appear to mean emulator.

The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?

You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Digital-Design-Introduction-Top-Do...

[2] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/apple-ii-plus-rev-7-rf...
by hu3 | 2025-04-22 23:41:42+00:00
Check out 300+ comments about the recent o3/Gemini post [1] in podcast style:

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/9648f705-2420-4039-8a...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744173

I can see myself grabbing popcorn to listen to flamewars in this style!

Steps to create your own:

1) https://notebooklm.google.com

2) Create new Notebook.

3) Add Website link as source.

4) Press [Generate] button to the right in Deep Dive conversation section.

5) Wait a minute and hit play!
by userbinator | 2025-04-22 23:41:54+00:00
That's total BS, unless it's MS' own code in those extensions. Very typical of them to blame others when it's their own shit code that's causing the problem.

As the other comment here notes, shell extensions have been around for a long time, and have never been a problem on older versions of Windows running on hardware that's much slower than what's available today.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-22 23:42:37+00:00
Yeah, if the first thing they show in a promo video is using an app, I'm already rolling my eyes. If they instead just show the product working, and then "one more thing" the demo with app control, maybe I'll get my eyes to face forward the entire demo. It seems like the "but on a computer" just went to "but it has an app" mental picture.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-22 23:42:43+00:00
> Most of the apps in discussion see little to no use and go dead soon after launch

That's not convincing. Of the apps that do get used, the vibe-coded ones will likely be unsafe.

> If a user is confident enough about a no name company that they give them enough info to make identity theft a possibility

That's completely unrelated. You can give a company very little information. Any of it being leaked is unacceptable. You can find a lot from an email, or a phone number.

People are taught, by CNBC, by suits, by hacks, that you can trust the apps on your commercials and it will be fine. It likely won't be, and your response is exactly why. Many of you are apathetic to the idea of doing right by people.

So people are manipulated, and some of them are elderly and don't even understand how computers work. This is reason enough to care about what they are exposed to, not say "let's burn it all down with shitty vibe-coding because users are dumb anyway."

We're supposed to be better than this.
by pelagic_sky | 2025-04-22 23:43:47+00:00
I second the feedback on directly reaching out to pixel game developers and getting feedback from them on your product.

Unrelated to your question, here are some thoughts on the product. The forced login will be a barrier to anyone curious to try this out. Yes, you do show examples, but I want to verify that my example would work. And...is this solving a real pain point? I am unfamiliar with pixel game creation. I would guess the hard parts are consistency of style for all assets. And animating the pixels into sprites would also be valuable. Would your product be able to handle these cases?
Ask HN: Should I open source or not?
by blindprogrammer | 2025-04-22 23:44:32+00:00
I am currently working on two projects: a PDF alternative for the blind and Google Maps/navigation for the blind in my city. I started from scratch with no AI or third-party reliance. I have written everything by hand (with considerable difficulty since I am blind), so what I am asking is: is it worth it to open source?

Embarrassing coding style aside, I am concerned about parasitic big corporations taking the code and putting it behind a paywall, which is not what I want for obvious reasons. Putting my projects under GPL will obviously hold them back a bit, with the cost that brilliant programmers who would have helped would be the casualty. Another issue I have is that I want zero AI-bros in my code. Not only would I be inviting disorganized, poorly constructed code, I also don't want these kids copy/pasting to add code they have no right to. What should I do?
by variaga | 2025-04-22 23:45:07+00:00
The banks know this is likely to happen, but believe (usually correctly) that they can sell the debt to someone else before it becomes worthless.

I.e. the deal for the bank is not "we're going to issue this loan and collect payments for it over the next 20 years", it's "we're going to issue $20M loans and simultaneously sell $21M of bonds backed by that loan. We skim the $1M difference for ourselves at basically no risk, and if the bonds default, they default. Not our problem."

Why do people buy the bonds?

- they think they can do the same thing - repackage the bonds as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), skim a percentage and dump the risk on someone else. This possibly includes hiding the risk by combining multiple different kinds of debt, and then issuing different 'tranches' with different risk/reward levels. (this is what happened to a lot of mortgages in the 2008 financial crisis)

- they only plan to hold the bonds for a short time (the company will probably make the first few loan, and hence bond payments) and sell them to someone who's further removed from the original sale (who may have not done their due diligence) before things go badly

- they believe the private equity propaganda (propaganda works! at least sometimes) and actually think the bonds will be paid off.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-22 23:46:24+00:00
>there can be some value in trying to predict a path for future technologies

Oh yeah I agree 100%. I probably shouldn’t waste my time on a real criticism when so much of what they believe is clearly motivated reasoning, but it’s just that I do find this sort of thought intriguing, and their complete failure to do it rationally is incredibly disappointing to me. I love sci fi that actually explores what the future might look like; blindsight and echopraxia are great examples. This shit is a mockery of that kind of work and it pisses me off.
by scubbo | 2025-04-22 23:46:33+00:00
I'm really confused by products like this and Warp Drive[0]. What does this add over a shell script?

There is a response elsewhere in comments[1] which claims that this is trying to fix the problem of bad documentation, but this has the same fundamental problem. If you a) are responsible for fixing something, b) are unfamiliar with it, and c) the "fixing resources" - whether those are scripts, documentation, or a Runbook/Workflow - you were provided with by the experts are out-of-date; you're SOL and are going to have to get to investigating _anyway_. A runbook and a script are just different points along the spectrum of "how much of this is automated and how much do I have to copy-paste myself?"[2] - both are vulnerable to accuracy-rot.

[0]: https://www.warp.dev/warp-drive

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43766842

[2]: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...
by toast0 | 2025-04-22 23:46:48+00:00
The interest rates are high, and the lenders likely will sell off the loans in a few years. If the company sticks around for a few years and looks ok, they might even be able to sell the loan for more than they lent out. Especially if the corporate numbers look good because of short-term changes, they may be able to get out.

When the company goes bankrupt, the lenders have first priority for remaining assets, sometimes lenders will takeover a business and run it away from the shore and earn a profit that way, too.
by rglullis | 2025-04-22 23:47:47+00:00
Even those "running the place" are doing it within the democratic system established and managed by the State. You can try to twist as hard you can, but to think that the US has become some form of Theocracy is absurd.

I am not going to argue that the democratic institutions are not under attack, but I am arguing that there is no key religious figure remotely close to take power and become the head of State, at any level whatsoever.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-22 23:48:52+00:00
> I don't know, but there is lots of geological evidence that 12-13,000 years ago there were several cataclysmic meteor strikes, and the earths temperature swung up and down wildly, eventually settling at a much higher temperature (ending the ice age). I am pretty sure this is accepted by the geological community.

You're wrong about this. There's not a lot of evidence for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. In particular, the best evidence--an actual meteoric impact crater--is completely missing. This is why proponents have instead suggested either that it was a series of large airbursts or an impact in the Laurentide ice sheet itself, to be able to keep a large crater from forming.

The current consensus hypothesis is that it's a reconfiguration of the glacial lake outflows on the margin of the Laurentide ice sheet that induced a breakdown of the thermohaline circulation system, which also explains some peculiarities of the Younger Dryas (like its effects were a lot worse in North America than the rest of the world).
by bigyabai | 2025-04-22 23:49:16+00:00
If it were me, the accessibility benefits of open source far outweigh the potential cost of letting AI-obsessives use it. You can toss it on a public repo with the license of your choice, update it at your leisure and anyone that disagrees will have to fork it.

I'm not super fond of AI myself and I definitely see how it can result in low-quality contributions pushed upstream. At the same time - if someone can use FOSS to genuinely improve their life, even with AI-generated modifications, I'd hope they do. Maybe that's just me, though.
by tzs | 2025-04-22 23:50:00+00:00
Ships are pretty noisy and whales are pretty smart, so the obvious question is why don't they figure out that it is bad to get hit by a ship, that the ships don't see the whales and so aren't able to avoid them, and so move out of the way when a ship is approaching?

Is it that the noise from the ships is too low in frequency for the whale to be able to tell what direction it is from? If that is the case could the ships add a higher frequency emitter that the whales could localize, emitting some standardized pattern of pings that the whales could learn means ship?
by dc396 | 2025-04-22 23:50:18+00:00
I'd be a bit hesitant to rely too heavily on Universe 25. For one thing, people aren't (generally, there are exceptions) rats. For another, it doesn't appear Universe 25 was independently replicated. In a quick Google search, I found https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941, which says:

"Were the results of the Universe 25 experiment reproduced by other scientists?

The social effects of population density vary between organisms and populations. Calhoun’s work inspired many scientists to focus on behavioral studies, but the specific experiment has not been replicated."

This surprises me a bit as it seems like it'd be relatively straightforward to replicate. This is one of my frustrations with behavioral science: so many (potentially) interesting results, but little replication and increasing refutation, leading to the current "replication crisis".

FWIW from a non-scientist.
by avidiax | 2025-04-22 23:51:00+00:00
My Pixel just bases this off of the morning alarm clock. Since I don't like waking to an alarm, this just means that I have a permanent silent 9am alarm.

I do hope that USB PD and (to a lesser extent) Qi takeover the charging space. There is really no reason to have every SoC vendor create their own incompatible fast charging standard.
Show HN: JSONXMLKit – Format JSON/XML and Decode Base64 in the Browser
by makertoo | 2025-04-22 23:51:21+00:00
I built this because I was constantly switching tabs to format JSON or XML, or decode Base64 — and many of the tools I found were either bloated, sent my data to a server, or just didn’t support things like XPath or JSONPath.

JSONXMLKit runs 100% in-browser, and includes:

JSON and XML formatters

Path search with JSONPath and XPath

File-based Base64 encoder/decoder (images, PDFs, etc.)

No login, no uploads. Just a set of quick, client-side tools I needed and decided to share. Feedback welcome!
by closeparen | 2025-04-22 23:51:34+00:00
I know a team like this. They delegate relatively junior members to take inbound design consultations from other teams. They string you along for months with a tentative alignment. Then finally the real decision-maker reviews your proposal, and he wants a total do-over. So you've got 6+ months with nothing to show. Just incredibly antisocial behavior that has caused hundreds of wasted engineer-months and gotten some very talented engineers I know very nearly fired.

Upholding a strong vision is fine. But if you want to be a blocker, you've also got to be quick. The alternative is a bureaucratic death spiral.
by handoflixue | 2025-04-22 23:53:08+00:00
> Why is the idea of a child talking to a LLM creepy?

The target audience is young kids who are still developing socialization skills. This toy off-boards that development from a human to an AI. We don't really know how that affects a kid.

This also plausibly trains the kid to think of other people as AIs: subservient tools that exist primarily to respond to them. Not exactly a healthy attitude to take towards one's peers.

It's presumably also going to get a lot of unsupervised usage, and the occasional AI model updates. What happens when a bad model update has it advising kids that soap is a forbidden candy that tastes delicious?

(I'm not saying any of these is particularly likely, just trying to share the sort of concerns that would lead someone to feeling creeped out)
by Aloisius | 2025-04-22 23:53:13+00:00
> The rich borrow against gains

That they have to pay back with interest. This made a little sense except for short-term loans when one had liquidity issues when interest rates were close to zero or in very, very limited circumstances where someone knew they were close to death - but that more has to do with the broken way we handle taxing inheritance.

With the prime rate is 7.5% today, it makes far less sense.

> "re-invest" (no profit) into durable assets for their business

Capital expenditures aren't subtracted from revenue. They have no effect on profit.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-22 23:53:52+00:00
> so their customers can obtain data about your usage

I can't prove it, but I suspect selling data is a very minor consideration in the appification of everything.

Aside from there actually being people who like that kind of thing (and them apparently being more common than people who like physical forms of self-flagellation), the main benefit of appifying everything is the opportunity to sell you "value-add services", aka sell you a subscription for the hardware you already bought.
by dehrmann | 2025-04-22 23:54:17+00:00
GP is repeating the PE as corporate raiders story, but leaving out that these are often struggling, mismanaged companies, and that those loans have a sophisticated counterparty. The lenders might eat the losses, but after a few rounds, they'll demand higher interest rates once they see PE's turnaround track record. This is actually an example of where markets work; it's just ugly to see a beloved band go out like this.
by hintymad | 2025-04-22 23:54:29+00:00
> I liked math and physics and economics and even chemistry,

I think the reason is that these subjects give students a sense of instant gratification and instant empowering. Every concept and every theorem could be a breakthrough to my problem-solving skills, and I can immediately see how I can solve more problems through the learning.

But of course, nothing gives more instant gratification than CS. I can try and build things via my keyboard at any time. The learning and the associated work does not get better than that.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-22 23:54:35+00:00
> "Virtual choirs" are divisive and ableist. Only those who have the "proper technology" can even consider admission to these groups.

I could not disagree more.

I play D&D, and I strongly prefer in-person games to online games, to the point where I won't really entertain an online one without exceptional circumstances.

But it feels silly to suggest that this is ableist. I'm glad you were able to find a community when you were homeless, but for a lot of people, a car is required to show up in person, and costs a hell of a lot more than a basic laptop, or a cellphone. (And that's before we get to the fact that this study seems to focus explicitly on people with dementia, for whom traveling anywhere is likely more difficult than it is for you!)

Yes, latency is an issue, but I don't think these people are trying to put on professional performances; they're just looking for something social to do together, and singing is that thing for them.
Show HN: Trailmarks – Huge, browser-based, Carmen Sandiego-style travel game
by matsxmats | 2025-04-22 23:55:08+00:00
I'd love to have people test-play my Carmen Sandiego/Backpacker style travel game. It's a retro genre... but if you like geography and quizzes, you'll like this! It's a working alpha with most of the content I intend to add, but I need to have people give it a try now before I decide which directions to fully develop!

I'm torn between putting effort into missions, more advanced in-game trading economy or creating more of a narrative. But I'm also curious if you get the navigation, if the core gameplay makes sense and if you want to continue playing, basically.

Hope you find it worth playing. It's a pure browser game with no login, you're playing for free immediately in this alpha! Please feel welcome to DM feedback or reply or anything!
by defrost | 2025-04-22 23:55:54+00:00
Let's assume I've read the link and have had discussions with both visual and radio spectrum astronomers and astrophysicists.

Starlink satellites pollute the night sky with both reflected sunlight and intended and unintended radio spectrum noise.

Manmade objects that inject light into an otherwise dark sky fit the category of skyglow, reflected sunlight tends to be sharper and less diffuse than atmospherically scattered ground lighting .. it's all extraneous human caused pollution from the PoV of telescopes.
by CharlesW | 2025-04-22 23:56:03+00:00
The parent commenter is correct: Chrome is blocking third-party cookies if the user chooses that behavior. The only thing that's changed is that they won't be doing it by default, or letting users know about this privacy-protecting option.

From TFA: "Until today, Google was still planning to roll out a dialog in Chrome that would prompt users to turn off third-party cookies in favor of Google's updated solution. […] …Google won't be pushing that cookie dialog to users. You can still choose to disable third-party cookies in Chrome, though."
by gerdesj | 2025-04-22 23:56:41+00:00
"somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance ..."

You'll need to speak "whale" first with this awful scheme.

A small whale is a few tonnes in mass a large one can be 150 tonnes. That is very easy to detect via SONAR.

Funnily enough a few specialised Japanese and Chinese ships are capable of detecting whales with amazing accuracy to the point of delivering small warheads.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-04-22 23:57:44+00:00
I feel something is missing at the moment with our ability to choose on the device how I want it to charge. Would be nice to plug the phone in and unless I say otherwise it does a nice slow charge even if the cable and charger is capable of more. But if I press a button on the front after I plug it in then I can select fast and it goes as quickly as the combination allows. Its irritating to have to have different chargers for this to preserve the battery.

Its pretty bad that only recent phones have started to add the ability to charge to only 80% to keep the battery in the optimal zone to extend the life given how long we have known that 80% was the optimal maximum. There are also a few phones now able to power themselves from USB without using the battery which if you leave them in chargers a lot throughout the day and night seems like a good feature to have to preserve the battery further.

Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly but its pretty wasteful. We ended up going through lots of special chargers that all do very similar things and now you get a device and it often doesn't even come with a cable let alone a charger and you are digging through the specs of your charger, cable and device to work out if its all going to mesh correctly together or you'll be stuck on slow mode. We have ended up with so many standards for getting quicker than the basic charge its going to take a while for all these devices to age out and in the meantime chargers are going to be doing QC and PD and a host of other things besides for a while.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-04-22 23:59:05+00:00
> Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.

The worst part is that MacPorts already did the same thing, but used hardlinks to avoid the kinds of problems that emerge when (for example) `realpath` resolves a symlink to an unexpected versioned directory that’s supposed to be an implementation detail.

There was a lot of FUD, dishonesty, and shallow understanding from the homebrew creators in the beginning.
by TankeJosh | 2025-04-22 23:59:26+00:00
Appreciate the detailed feedback and definitely agree that wrapping these cloud services is a bad idea. Our last product did this and it went exactly how you described.

Our goal isn’t really to make deploying “easy” per se, we mainly want to help infra / DevOps teams make better configuration changes faster by blending AI code gen with specialized RAG + static analysis + human review. The cool thing about using LLMs for this use case is that we don’t need to do the 1:1 mapping you described, we can instead just teach the agent to use the underlying systems directly.

We like to think of ourselves as the anti-PaaS since we help engineering teams manage their own platform. Most of these teams already use Terraform and can continue to manage their infra however they like, they'll just do it faster and probably catch some issues that slipped through the cracks before.

Our launch post did a bad job mentioning this focus on infra teams, so I apologize if that caused any confusion! Maybe "the Cursor for infra teams" would be a better way to describe infra.new