MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-04-07 07:51:42+00:00
I think you miss the point of the article, which precisely says that we store a ton of data we don't need to store in the first place.

Photos of kids are obviously not part of that "crap" (even if we have too many of them and it would be worth triaging for our own sake).

The question is: what makes for most of that data? Is that all business records, or is that storing stuff because we can? I've worked in multiple startups, all were tracking users as much as they could. Adding tools that collect data is easy, and storing that data is cheap. "We may need it later". Never needed any of that crap, and it was invading our users' privacy.

In any case, I think the article raises a good point: it's so cheap to store crap that we don't even think about it. And it's bad for the environment. Just like it's so cheap to take a plane that we don't think about it, even when taking the train takes almost the same time.
by mcv | 2025-04-07 07:52:03+00:00
> It's interesting (and troubling) how these ragebaiting, Dark Mirror style positions used to be a bit less common but with the advent of social media have absolutely exploded into the dominant form of political discourse that now determines elections.

I think that's because it really has become more common to support certain politics merely out of opposition to other people. There are people who seem to support Trump not because they actually believe what he says, but merely because he hates the right kind of people. There are people who seem to just want to "make libs cry" even if it hurts themselves.

I suppose the real ideological difference there may be that they see their political opponents as inherently evil and they believe they need to be punished at any cost, but at some point it becomes nearly indistinguishable from a dark mirror.
by otterley | 2025-04-07 07:53:00+00:00
90% of libraries consist of books that are never opened. These books were all produced by destroying and processing trees, sometimes with toxic chemicals, and their information density is orders of magnitude lower than that of a hard disk or SSD. Same with photo processing, where 90% of photos taken are discarded, and the toxicity of the chemicals is even higher.

So the question isn't simply whether storage is wasted; it's how much waste there is relative to the environmental impact. Granted, books and photographs don't need to be continuously fed energy to make the information available. However, the cost of storage is now so cheap that even with 90% waste, it's economically viable to keep it online. So the problem, if you can call it one, is that energy is too cheap, and externalities are not accounted for in the cost.
by torginus | 2025-04-07 07:53:36+00:00
Apologies.. I kinda had trouble communicating the idea I had in mind - when I was bashing SF, I wasn't rallying against novels of Hugo and Nebula quality. The word I was looking for is genre fiction.

Lately I've been consuming more of it than I would admit in polite company - LitRPG, Military SF, YA stuff,. - and quite a bit of it is aimed at a younger audience.

A lot of this stuff is well written and engaging, but highly derivative, and is patterned on classics.
Show HN: I rebuilt my platform afetr getting 2 clients
by HarisMladenov | 2025-04-07 07:54:41+00:00
Hey everyone,

I first launched Alytica, my product analytics platform, back on December 21, 2024. I built it for two simple reasons:

1.I needed a solid and easy-to-use analytics solution for my own projects.

2.I'm naturally curious (okay, a bit geeky ) and wanted to see firsthand how these platforms handle tons of events.

Initially, I challenged myself to create and launch the MVP in just three weeks. Honestly, it wasn't perfect—in fact, it was pretty rough. But I decided to launch anyway, and surprisingly, I got a few clients who actually liked it.

Two or three months ago, I started rebuilding it from the ground up, and I'm excited to finally share Alytica v2! This new version is exactly what I had in mind from the start—more reliable, user-friendly, and packed with improvements. And there's still plenty more coming soon.

To celebrate this relaunch, I'm giving the first 100 users 20% off their first month with the code LAUNCH20. There's also a free plan available, so you can easily try it out without any commitment.

Check it out at alytica.tech and let me know what you think!
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-07 07:56:00+00:00
Keep track of where it has been; you don't need to buy at the absolute lowest point, if it creeps back up you can slowly buy in again.

Have a look at trackers like the S&P 500 after previous crashes, it takes 3-6 years for the market to return to its previous highest value. Or six months in the case of the panny-D crash.
by ruicraveiro | 2025-04-07 07:56:35+00:00
I think that you are ignoring Newton's 3rd law, which pretty much can be applied to economics in this case. What made the US really great was the fact that it was the center of the liberal world order and the coalition of friends that it built around itself, including the EU countries. Let's see how well the US does when it loses most of its friends. Focusing on the EU, the US wants to balance the goods trade deficit with the EU, but it has a services surplus with the EU. Goods deficit vs services surplus roughly balanced each other before the tariffs. Guess what we in the EU will need to do? In the end it will be loose-loose for everyone, but in the long run the then friendless US will be the biggest loser.
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-04-07 07:57:34+00:00
A recent (2014) and intriguing concept for making a small computer that feels like it was made in the past is the PDP-11/Hack, which only uses a DEC J-11 microprocessor, some RAM, and a common UART.

The original concept By Brent Hilpert:

http://madrona.ca/e/pdp11hack/index.html

Another implementation:

https://www.chronworks.com/J11/

A more complex and modern PDP-11/Hack:

https://www.5volts.ch/pages/pdp11hack/
by Someone | 2025-04-07 07:58:40+00:00
> If pro life people really cared that millions of babies were murdered every year there would be assassinations against abortion providers and bombings of clinics.

Are you claiming there aren’t any?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_...: “In the United States, violence directed towards abortion providers has killed at least eleven people, including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, two people (unclear of their connection), and a clinic escort.

[…]

According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[I 30] 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.

[…]

According to NAF, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, property crimes committed against abortion providers have included 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 91 attempted bombings or arsons, 619 bomb threats, 1630 incidents of trespassing, 1264 incidents of vandalism, and 100 attacks with butyric acid ("stink bombs")”
by Joker_vD | 2025-04-07 07:58:46+00:00
Sorry, my comment was intended to be reply to the one of yours that said

I/O is done piecewise, a line at a time. The file is never "loaded up". Again you're applying an intuition about how parsers are presented to college students (suck it all into RAM and build a big in-memory representation of the syntax tree) that doesn't match the way actual config file parsers work (read a line and interpret it, then read another).

So, the whole file is usually loaded up (if it's short enough). At this point you might as well parse all of it, instead of re-reading it from the disk over and over, and redoing the same work over and over; parsed configs — if they are parsed into falgs/enums, and not literal strings — usually take about the same, or less, memory than a FILE structure from libc does on the whole.

The complexity of the algorithm is about the same, either the early exit is here or it isn't (in fact, the version with the early exit, now that I think of it, has larger cyclotomatic complexity but whatever).
by ahofmann | 2025-04-07 07:58:46+00:00
"PHP is in decline" or "PHP is dead" can be happily ignored. People saying this based on “data” pulled out of someone else's butt. This is going on since almost 10 years, and it is wrong since ever. PHP is chugging along just fine and will do this for the coming decades. PHP is in this regard the COBOL of the web.
by jjcob | 2025-04-07 07:58:46+00:00
We got a really nice Bosch induction hob for 700€. I installed it myself in less than an hour (the hardest part was cutting the appropriate hole in the worktop).

All of our pots except one was compatible. You will only have problems with very cheap aluminum pans, or with some high end copper cookware. I don't know anyone who has copper cookware, so the problem for most people are their cheap aluminium pans and pots. You should probably replace them anyway. Most stainless steel, all cast iron or forged iron pans are compatible with induction.

Induction is pretty spectacular. It's a bit different than gas, but a good induction hob is both more powerful than gas on the high end, and much better at controlling temperature at the low end.

The only thing I dislike are the touch controls on most units, but I guess you can't have it all.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 07:59:08+00:00
Thank you for the comments!

Moldable Development is different from programming in Smalltalk. It's not a way of advertising Smalltalk, it's a new way of programming :)

Moose indeed came from academia and was focused on various kinds of analyses. Glamorous Toolkit does include a small part of it, but it is a whole environment.

Thank you for the suggestion related to use cases. Today, people tend to look for specific tools that can be used out of the box for a specific set of problem. Something like gritql fits in that expectation well.

The challenge we face is that Moldable Development is generic and it is applicable in a wide range of scenarios. For example, the video on the front page tries to provide an idea of classes of use cases. The GT book offers many more such case studies. All of these are accommodated uniformly in the same environment with small energy. This is novel and requires awareness which leads to a catch-22 problem.

We try to address this also coming from the larger problem at https://moldabledevelopment.com, including a new book I am writing with Simon Wardley.

We would be interested in suggestions for how to communicate it better.
by reportgunner | 2025-04-07 07:59:18+00:00
Article makes it seem like finding diamonds is some kind of super complicated logical puzzle. In reality the hardest part is knowing where to look for them and what tool you need to mine them without losing them once you find them. This was given to the AI by having it watch a video that explains it.

If you watch a guide on how to find diamonds it's really just a matter of getting an iron pickaxe, digging to the right depth and strip mining until you find some.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-07 07:59:45+00:00
While I'm of the opinion that countries should become more self-sufficient for as many things as possible (because pollution of intercontinental shipping and political tensions / leverage... although that goes both ways), I know it's simply not possible since not everything is available everywhere, resource and knowledge / expertise wise.

But if more independence was the goal, they should've made it a long-term goal, not a trap door. China does this a lot better with their 5 year plans in my opinion. I'm not a fan of China either (human rights etc), but they are on track to take over as the world's leading economic force. In fact I think they already are, but the west is sleepwalking. China has got a(n economic) hand in a lot of countries around the world, and I think the raw figures like GPD are only telling part of the story.
by timr | 2025-04-07 07:59:54+00:00
> I don't think you fully grasp the gravity of Trump's actions.

I "grasp the gravity", to the extent that anyone is actually able to do so at this time. I am unwilling to engage in hyperbole in order to create the illusion of a nearby black hole.

This is a non-partisan reaction. I am opposed to tariffs; I am also opposed to panic and exaggeration.

> This goes well beyond the suspicion that Trump is a Russian stooge.

Your choice of neutral, unbiased language is compelling.
Show HN: A free movies and series randomiser
by justanotherunit | 2025-04-07 08:00:30+00:00
Hi HN! Over 3 years ago I developed a movies and series randomiser in Cordova web to deploy on app stores.

The first versions had ads in it to monetize the development, also a "PRO" version was released for the price of 1 dollar (or something like that, the lowest price tier as far as I remember).

Anyway, in recent years I've reached a point where all applications does not need to be monetized, some are just fun to develop and release for free. Show me a Movie is one of them! The current state of the app is the same as of 3 years ago. Besides getting it to work in the browser, minor bug fixes has been fixed.

With that said, go ahead and try it out. It is totally free, I only track page count using GoatCounter (for the fun of it). If you want to can leave some valuable feedback and insight which either I or someone else on HN can use in future projects!

Warm regards, Lukas
by actionfromafar | 2025-04-07 08:01:38+00:00
The contents are simple. How to interpret the contents, is not simple. That is why you see internet advice advocating for keeping old raw files around, because Lightroom and Photoshop sometimes gets updates which can cram out better results from old raw files.

(Edit: I mean, if you want to get a basic debayered RGB image from a raw, that's not too hard. But if you want to cram out the most, there are a lot of devils in a lot of details. Things like estimating how many green pixels are not actually green, but light-spill from what should have been red pixels is just the beginning.)
by atoav | 2025-04-07 08:02:04+00:00
Being a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to other engineering disciplines. Sure wrangling complexity and a shitton of knowledge is a lot of work, but most other engineering disciplines have much higher stakes, require you to put yourself out there and can land you in jail if you don't do your craft as you should.

Have you ever heard of a modern software engineer who landed in jail because their error was part of an incident thst costed others their lives? Typically software errors are shrugged away as if they are extreme wheather events thst nobody can change.

Creating usable elegant, efficient, reliable, testable and maintainable software isn't trivial, but it is doable and the consequences to not getting it 100% right are usually comparably mild.

If I fuck up a part of code I usually produce a crash, patch it and I am good to go, if I select the wrong cables and put them into a building, I either cause a fire or I have to tear the whole building open to replace them, and let's not talk about civil engineering..

I remember sitting in a class of 30 people where people had over 30 different solutions to a complex load calculation of the kind that could kill people if it was realized.
by Arnt | 2025-04-07 08:02:17+00:00
Locking up Mexicans, Indonesians for days? Not new at all. Harassing anyone and everyone, sure. A then-former prime minister of Norway was harassed at the US border, they kept him for hours.

But 19 days when you have a rich-country passport and pale white skin is off the former scale. It's weird.
by palata | 2025-04-07 08:02:41+00:00
This.

We need to think about the data we need to store before we store it, only store the data that we need to store, and only store it for as long as needed.

It reminds me of CIs. It's now so easy to throw 40 jobs on GitHub actions that people don't think about them. I have been in a startup where people would debug in CI: they wouldn't have e.g. Windows on their machine (maybe they should have, given that their product was supposed to run there) and were fixing compilation issues by sending patches and patches to the CI. Every single time it would trigger the 40 jobs. Sometimes you could see a patch sent every 5 min for 3 days (where reproducing the issue locally would actually take 3s and not 5min). They did not even bother disabling the 39 uninteresting jobs.

For open source projects, it's just wasted energy, for private repos it was costing the company a lot. This was just malpractice. But nobody cared. The finance person would say "GitHub is expensive", the CEO that "well we need it" and the engineers that "I don't want that Windows crap on my computer", I suppose.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-07 08:02:46+00:00
Sure, in general accusing your opponents of just being You But Evil is boring and betrays a lack of Theory of Mind but consider the people who believe that our modern society with all of its comforts could only occur under the free markets we have but simultaneously believe that these comforts are bad.

“What a caricature! You fool why would anyone believe that! Your opponents are not saying that!”

But what if they are? Famously bananas in winter would not exist and that would be good.
by infoSecer | 2025-04-07 08:03:20+00:00
I don't really know what its job is to be honest.

Saying that the input data is wrong and the AI didn't hallucinate that data is also kind of a "trust me bro" statement. The Mandiant feed is not public, so I cannot check what was fed to it.

I don't really care why its wrong. It is wrong. And using that as the example prompt in your announcement is an interesting choice.
by trilbyglens | 2025-04-07 08:03:30+00:00
As stated, on paper yes this is true, however the feds and the executive branch specifically have the ability to supra-legally harass and roadblock localities by doing things like revoking or delaying federal funding as leverage or blackmail.

Of course these things would be "illegal" but reaching court decisions can take years and in the meantime a locality might be starved out and give in to pressure.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 08:04:17+00:00
Over the last couple of years we added a reasonably extensive infrastructure for working with Python from within GT. You can define contextual inspector views both in GT and in Python for live Python objects, for example. There is also a debugger for Python.

Also, GT is now also a distributed Smalltalk system, too. We use it in productive settings to compute large jobs on large data sets :)
by palata | 2025-04-07 08:04:39+00:00
Well that article clearly says "it's hurting the environment, and in my experience the vast majority of that data is useless".

Which I believe is not uninteresting, given the amount of answers here where people say "Is that data useless? I don't know, I could imagine that it's not, I think it's a hard problem". Well here we have one person saying "I have experience in that, and I can tell you that most of it is useless". Just a data point, but that's still interesting.
by piva00 | 2025-04-07 08:05:02+00:00
Thank you but I really don't think it should be considered "good analysis". It's an extremely basic analysis made by a layman (me) with just a cursory knowledge of macroeconomics, and average reasoning skills.

The case that I could come up with it in 5 minutes while writing a comment on a forum just showcases how braindead this policy is, more than braindead, how one needs to be ideologically compromised to even float this idea as something that could work in reality.

Whatever "model" the dumbfucks in the USA administration came up with to justify to themselves any support for this will meet with reality very, very fast, and the major problem here is that they are stubbornly ideological, Trump won't change his fucking demented mind when reality hits, he will double down like he usually does, and all of us will feel the pain, a large majority of the world's population will feel the impacts of this, layoffs are coming if this policy continues even for just a few months, businesses closing (big and small), lots and lots of suffering will be inflicted because Americans decided to elect a stupid man, surrounded by stupid sycophants.

Just compare the current administration's background with any other serious nation on Earth, it's bonkers that the Americans are accepting being led by absolutely incompetent people: Education being led by an entertainment business person, Defence being led by a TV host, Health being led by an anti-science person whose claim to fame is being a relative of assassinated politicians, the list goes on and on.

It's so absurd that I lost any respect I had left for the USA as a society, it's deathly sick and already rotting... Maybe this is the time it will be put in the coffin, just fucking sucks to feel that my loved ones will all feel the pain of this rotting.

Edit:

Just as an example of the idiocy, this is a comment from Bessent, probably the person in this administration who is the closest to being more technical:

> Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted there didn’t need to be a recession and dismissed the long-term impact of stock market losses, using words like “choppiness” and “adjustment process” to explain the panic. And speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Bessent rejected the idea that people who want to retire soon had taken a serious blow. “Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said. He added: “The reason the stock market is considered a good investment is because it’s a long-term investment. If you look day-to-day, week-to-week, it’s very risky. Over the long term, it’s a good investment.”

The absolute denial of reality, coming from what most would consider the "competent grown up" in the whole administration. Absolute shambles...
by ahofmann | 2025-04-07 08:05:35+00:00
I don't know what you want to say with those screenshots.

I think you get backlash here, because you tried to promote your own work with the argument that the work of other people is bad. Since you attacked potentially a few thousand developers, you should expect negative reactions.

Even if you hadn't attacked the most used PHP framework, it has a sour taste to shit on someone else's work.
Show HN: Teach Your Parents Smartphone
by pankajtanwar | 2025-04-07 08:05:37+00:00
My parents got super confused when PhonePe (payment app in India) updated their app overnight. They immediately blamed me for "breaking their phone" lol. I had to spend an hour showing them how to use the new design.

Same thing happened with WhatsApp video calls. I realized this is a common problem - we teach our parents tech stuff once, but they forget because they don't practice enough.

So I made this tool that lets my parents practice using apps through step-by-step tutorials at their own pace. No one rushing them, no one judging.

The goal? Help my parents feel more confident with technology and give them a safe space to practice without feeling stupid for asking the same questions over and over.

Check it out here - https://www.teach-your-parents-smartphone.com/ Open sourced codebase - https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/teach-your-parents-smar...
by kookamamie | 2025-04-07 08:06:44+00:00
DSLRs have just dropped off the wagon a long time ago, when it comes to software and especially meaningful UX innovation.

As an anecdote, I have a Sony a7r and operating it via its mobile app is one of the worst user experiences I have had in a while.

Same goes to the surrounding ecosystem of software. E.g. Adobe's Lightroom is full of obsolete paradigms and weird usability choises.