MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-07 10:18:57+00:00
>I don't really understand what this argument is trying to argue for; shell scripting languages are, for practical reasons, usually interpreted, and in the POSIX case, they usually don't have to be fast since they're usually just used to delegate operations off to other code for performance. Their main priority is ease of interop with their domain.

DDT is a hell of a lot older than Bourne shell, is not interpreted, does have full efficient access to the machine instructions and operation system, and it even features a built-in PDP-10 assembler and disassembler, and lets you use inline assembly in your login file to customize it, like I described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43609418

And even the lowly Windows PowerShell is much more recent, and blows Bourne shell out of the water along so many dimensions, by being VASTLY more interoperable, powerful, usable, learnable, maintainable, efficient, and flexible, with a much better syntax, as I described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43609571

>When even lowly Windows PowerShell blows your Unix shell out of the water along so many dimensions of power, usability, learnability, maintainability, efficiency, and flexibility, you know for sure your that your Unix shell and the philosophy it rode in on totally sucks, and self imposed ignorance and delusional denial is your only defense against realizing how bankrupt the Unix Philosophy really is.

>It's such a LOW BAR to lose spectacularly to, and then still try to carry the water and make excuses for the bankrupt "Unix Philosophy" cargo cult. Do better.
What if we made advertising pay the user?
by nextn | 2025-04-07 10:20:19+00:00
Then the user would get paid for getting interrupted.

The user could configure the browser/email-client/social-network to not accept messages that didn't submit a fee above some amount.

It would set a market price for human attention. The price would be public and known live to anyone.

Ad-tech co's get 100% of advertising revenue. Users get 0%. This would flip it around so users would get 80%-100% and ad-tech co's 0-20%.

It would make LLMs/AI spam prohibitively expensive.
by spopejoy | 2025-04-07 10:20:24+00:00
Is it really that hard to imagine "large companies not diversifying"?

Large companies diversifying is the unnatural thing. Why on earth should Apple do music, or Amazon do video? It's manipulating their monopoly positions, it's almost inherently anti-competitive, etc.

Just because antitrust in the US at least is so wimpy (exclusively looking for "consumer harm") there's no reason sane antitrust couldn't also protect ... competition itself, in the form of smaller players etc.

I don't think there's a single industry that merits the bloated conglomerates that rule the earth today, whether it's mining, autos, chips. It's just that capitalism inherently centralizes, and capitalism runs the show.
by Hamuko | 2025-04-07 10:20:59+00:00
My guess that the actual secure government messaging services are a pain to use vs. Signal that's on your phone in your pocket, and these people don't really value security over their own convenience. They did share some of the details over actual secure systems ("you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes"), but I guess when the attacks were starting, it was easier to just blast them on Signal.
by SebFender | 2025-04-07 10:21:30+00:00
Absolutely & very well said - my contention lies in the fact that certain skills are just that - technical. Especially when it comes to architecture, code, complex systems and so on.

I don't mind an illiterate Executive when it comes to basic manufacturing, cosmetics and so on - but when it comes to STEM subjects it becomes a dangerous gamble - especially when it comes to recognize a strong vs weak player.

Too many times I've seen weaker players get bumped up as the executive in charge is somewhat incompetent...

I've been lucky as my family forged my communication skills at a young age - but these days this is rare and I see extremely competent young players get sidelined quite rapidly... Hope is a mystery, but can be found.
by tim333 | 2025-04-07 10:22:41+00:00
There's good and bad from advertising. I think it needs to be regulated and restricted more than banned. They did some study and where advertising was banned prices were higher because low cost providers couldn't put up a get it cheaper here ad. In the UK solicitors are banned from advertising and it makes getting one an expensive pain in the arse.

In olden days we used to get a classified ads newspaper through the door and that was good as you could pick it up if you wanted to check out the ads or ignore/chuck it otherwise. I'd be fine with ads if I had to click to see them. It's having them in your face when you don't want them that's a pain.
by numpad0 | 2025-04-07 10:23:54+00:00
probably a similar percentage of people claim on their car insurance. In that 0.01% of cases where the order was fraudulent, placed by mistake, how much data do we need to store inefficiently, in a way that uses a lot of power and space?

I'm feeling, the real real question, as Sci-Fi as it gets, is, is the winning ticket data even data, OR is it more like a thumbnail of "the whole data" that is 98%+ worthless, than standalone piece of data?

The winning ticket ID, e.g. a "0x-636e-7461-4e7b", only makes sense in the context as one among the entire cohort of contestants; I can make one up like I did, but I can't walkout with the payout unless the rest of the lottery didn't exist.

Statistically, philosophically, technically, and all sorts of *-cally speaking, is the 2% data, the winning ticket datum, even data?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-07 10:26:07+00:00
Raw decoding is not as simple as you might think.

It’s the best place to add “signature steps.” Things like noise reduction, chromatic aberration correction, and one-step HDR processing.

I used to work for a camera manufacturer, and our Raw decoder was an extremely intense pipeline step. It was treated as one of the biggest secrets in the company.

Third-party deinterlacers could not exactly match ours, although they could get very good results.
by spopejoy | 2025-04-07 10:27:19+00:00
This is the best and most obvious example of successful anti-advertising legislation, NYC as well prohibits billboards in most places which is a blessing.

The fact that the MTA is now plastered in flatscreen ads is an example of huge overreach, and also an example of how better funding for public utilities like the subway eliminate the "need" for advertising that the MTA claims.

Unfortunately, this is the system working as designed per the capitalists. Underfund public utilities to make the public more dependent on the for-profit private sector. Banning ads is communism for this mindset.
by aragilar | 2025-04-07 10:27:48+00:00
unzip 6.0 is from 2009 (see the manpage or https://infozip.sourceforge.net/UnZip.html). I suspect there are patches floating around (so YMMV as to which patches are applied), or someone has aliases/symlinked some other implementation as "unzip" (like Apple has done here, though unlike unzip rsync is maintained).

Try using atool (which wraps the various options for different archives and should hopefully fix your problem) or the tools provided by https://libzip.org/documentation/.

Practically, what you're hitting is the problem when upstream is dead, and there is no coordination between different distros to centrally take over maintenance.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-04-07 10:28:15+00:00
These people *WERE* military personnel and there is no way they haven't been repeatedly exposed to proper procedures for information handling. They absolutely should know better and deserve to face consequences for this sort of incompetence.

Mike Walz is a Special Forces officer and only retired as a Colonel from the National Guard to take his position as National Security Advisor.

Tulsi Gabbard is still a Lieutenant Colonel in the National Guard.

Pete Hegseth was a Major in the National Guard, ending his service in 2021.

JD Vance is probably the most junior of the veterans, leaving the Marine Corps as a Corporal in 2007.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-07 10:28:50+00:00
> Can we not consider free as in beer here?

The rest of your comment didn't. How did you want to consider it?

> I think if we can make a distinction between modification and redistribution then open source can be less proscriptive.

I think new definitions should have new terms.

> If the source is open to view, and you are able to change that code in any way, just not redistribute your modifications, what would you call that?

Source available.
Show HN: I turned GitHub contributions into a retro battle game
by Imad_M | 2025-04-07 10:29:16+00:00
Hey HN,

This is a little web game called Epic Dev Battles of History. It takes public GitHub contribution stats (like commit counts, streaks, activity levels) and uses them to simulate a retro arcade-style battle between two profiles.

You can enter your GitHub username and challenge a friend or colleague, try the online matchmaking, or pick one of the pre-loaded profiles as an opponent. After the battle, it shows a breakdown of the stats used.

It started as a fun side-project to visualize GitHub activity in a different way.

You can play it live here: https://epicdevbattlesofhistory.com

It's currently a closed-source project. I'm curious to hear any thoughts you might have on the concept or gameplay, and please let me know if you encounter any bugs!
by refurb | 2025-04-07 10:30:23+00:00
From what I've gathered, Signal use was prolific among people in this administration and the past one.

I'm not surprised. My own company sends out several emails that Whatsapp can't be used as it's not secure, yet I get Whatsapp messages from leadership I work with constantly.

People ignore directives all the time. Usually out of convenience.

People have even called it out in a Whatsapp chat "hey guys, we're not supposed to use Whatsapp" and people usually ignore it.
by CRConrad | 2025-04-07 10:30:46+00:00
> hope you understand :)

Nope, sorry, I really don't. Or rather, I guess it's you who doesn't understand:

> i'm looking for people to support me building this for other "open-source IDEs" as i alone would not be able to do that

But, hey, you have an "AI" to help you with that! That is, if your Composer Web were actually anything near "intelligent", you wouldn't need any people to help you. Since you do, it apparently isn't really "intelligent".

Maybe the reason you can't get people to help you with it is because everyone else is also as fed up with the constant hype of calling every even slightly complex algorithm "AI" as I am. Sorry about that. (And that the sarcasm in my first comment went over your head.)
by petercooper | 2025-04-07 10:30:47+00:00
Even if the source is already transcribed anywhere, I'm interested at what your experience will be if you keep going all the way through. A lot of authors have done things like rewrite Shakespeare plays or famous novels out by hand and claim to have got a lot of the experience of feeling like they were getting into the author's mind and stuff.. I wonder if typing this out could be similarly enlightening.
by out_the_corner | 2025-04-07 10:31:20+00:00
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by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-07 10:32:09+00:00
Not publicly. It’s not difficult to figure out, but I make it a point, not to post stuff that would show up in their search algorithms.

But it was a pretty major one, and I ran their host image pipeline software team.

[Edited to Add] It was one of the “no comment” companies. They won’t discuss their Raw format in detail, and neither will I, even though it has been many years, since I left that company, and it’s likely that my knowledge is dated.
by dagw | 2025-04-07 10:32:13+00:00
Writing Notes/Dominos apps was my first 'programming' job (if you ignore cutting and pasting random javascript into HTML files...) back in 97. We created a whole suite of in house apps that basically ran the business, including making most of them available as web apps for people who didn't have the Notes Client. It was so fast and simple do to that even a 'dumb' kid with only a high school education and who barely knew how to program could be instantly productive, I honestly can't think of anything that can really match it even today.

I've always been slightly confused why they insisted on selling it as a mediocre email client rather than a quite fantastic RAD tool.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-07 10:32:39+00:00
You are taking this recommendation completely out of context. This is a recommendation for confidential communications, not releasable under public record laws.

But neither of those applies for the Signal chat in question. That was not confidential communication, it was top secret active military data. And, like any other military-related decision, it was very much in the category of information that must be recorded and was going to eventually be releasable under public record laws, as soon as its confidential nature expired, 50+ years from now most likely.
by sbuk | 2025-04-07 10:32:58+00:00
“This guy” is Don Hopkins who, amongst a long list of achievements in the field of computer science specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics, is one of the authors of the UNIX haters handbook - specifically the extremely prescient chapter 7 "The X-Windows Disaster", published when Linux was in its infancy. You don't have to like what he is saying, but he has decades of experience and research behind what he says. Know where your field came from. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward - sadly something a vocal minority of the community refuses to do.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/resume.html
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-07 10:34:22+00:00
I think this is a problem that arises from people working in these gargantuan organisations where individuals can't see how their work contributes to the success of the organisation. They perceive the organisation as a construct built around social relationships rather than a construct that exists to drive some change in or generate profit from the surrounding economy, because they can't see how their work drives that change or generates that profit.
by zimpenfish | 2025-04-07 10:34:39+00:00
> Getting diamonds is not even close to the hardest challenge in the game

Mining diamonds isn't even necessary if you build, e.g., ianxofour's iron farm on day one and trade that iron[0] with a toolsmith, armourer, and weaponsmith. You can get full diamond armour, tools, and weapons pretty quickly (probably a handful of game weeks?)

[0] Main faff here is getting them off their base trade level.
by uecker | 2025-04-07 10:34:49+00:00
Static analysis of arbitrary legacy code is limited. But I do not find it difficult to structure my code in a way that I can reasonable exclude most errors. The discussion of false positives in C is interesting. In some sense, 99% of what the Rust compiler would complain about would be considered false positives in C. So if you want to have safety in C, you can not approach this from this angle. But this relates to my point. If it is acceptable to structure the code in specific ways to make the Rust compiler happy, but you do not accept that you may have to write code in specific ways to avoid false positives in C, then you are already not comparing apples to apples.
by signa11 | 2025-04-07 10:35:43+00:00
[this went way outside the edit-window and hence a separate comment] imho, state of varying experience with llm's can aptly summed in this poem by Mr. Longfellow

There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid.
by auxym | 2025-04-07 10:36:21+00:00
It took a long time for Canon CR3 raw format to be supported by darktable because, although the format itself had been reverse engineered, there was a fear from the developers that it was covered by a patent and that they risked a lawsuit by integrating it in DT. IIRC, they had attempted to contact Cabon legal to obtain some sort of waiver, without success.

I'm fact I'm not sure how that saga ended and CR3 support was finally added a few years after the release of the Canon mirrorless cameras that output CR3.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-04-07 10:36:53+00:00
Anecdotally: schoolkids are at the leading edge of LLM innovation, and nowadays all homework assignments are explicitly made to be LLM-proof. (Well, at least in my son's school. Yours might be different.)

This effectively makes LLMs useless for education. (Also sours the next generation on LLMs in general, these things are extremely lame to the proverbial "kids these days".)
by cess11 | 2025-04-07 10:37:06+00:00
My pet peeve in this area that pretty much always gets overlooked by technical people even if they're somewhat experienced in management and business, is compliance. It's always good and profitable to adapt to and preferably implement representations of laws and regulations, including 'soft' rules, like standard contracts, established business practices, non-compulsory laws, things like that.

Even if no customer today cares about something, a form of employee compensation that is a bit unusual, say, or 'reversed' VAT declaration in invoicing, or whatever, if large actors in your segment do, and that's most likely the case, then you should at least build things based off the formalities in the local jurisdiction so that when your sales people get a big prospect on the hook you'll have an easy time adding what they need.

It can also shield from legal or financial liabilities if someone gets angry at you, and your lawyer will be happier and possibly cheaper if they know you understand your legal environment. If you're doing an exit buyers will also appreciate good compliance, just like they appreciate other forms of risk management.
by extra88 | 2025-04-07 10:38:43+00:00
All the electronic components are surface mounted to the PCB but that doesn't make it a finished product.

They've made the PCB about as nice-looking as one can but most people still wouldn't want it that way; the raw buttons on the front in particular are not a good look or feel. There's no stand and the only mounting solution provided is a hole in the board. Power appears to be through the Pico's USB port on the side.
by refurb | 2025-04-07 10:39:26+00:00
The iPhone contacts app is an absolute cluster of an app in terms of how it manages adding contacts (or allows other apps to add contacts).

Years ago I had my nicely arranges contacts in place, then added Gmail and it upload contacts so now they were all duplicated. Then when I dug into it, I realize you have have folders of different contacts, but depending on the view they are shown as combined.

Then add on top Gmail keeps asking me if I want to update someone's contacts from an email they sent me. I click yes, but it keeps coming up even though their contact info doesn't change (what?).

Then if I try to copy a message from iMessage, it will randomly assume a number is someone's phone number and ask me if I want to create a new contact (what?). If my fingers were fatter it would be easier to click "yes" and end up with a non-phone number added to some person's contacts.

I only trust the contacts that I add manually, everything else is suspect.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-07 10:39:37+00:00
> The covid crisis was an actual event in physical reality not caused by admin policies.

Sortof yeah, but also sortof not. Basically any non-Trump president would have been briefed about Covid in January 2020, and most of the previous ones invested a bunch of resources into making sure that the disease was contained far away from US shores.

Even Bush II would have done that (and did, I believe for SARS).
by heresie-dabord | 2025-04-07 10:40:48+00:00
> It probably depends a lot on what you are using them for, and in general, I think it's still too early to say exactly where LLMs will lead us.

Even approximations must be right to be meaningful. If information is wrong, it's rubbish.

Presorting/labelling various data has value. Humans have done the real work there.

What is "leading" us at present are the exaggerated valuations of corporations. You/we are in a bubble, working to justify the bubble.

Until a tool is reliable, it is not installed where people can get hurt. Unless we have revised our concern for people.
by tpm | 2025-04-07 10:40:53+00:00
> That means education system is bad and has failed people

What if the education system can't fix this? Not just the current one - any education system.

> that people are so desperate with their living standards

What if people's propensity to believe utter bullshit is independent of their financial situation?

> Either way, those are symptoms, not the cause

What if the tendency to believe bullshit is the cause? You have failed to prove it isn't, so your proposed solutions probably won't work and indeed may make matters much worse.
by baumschubser | 2025-04-07 10:41:52+00:00
> The reality is that we spend FAR more time reading code than writing it. That is why readability is far more important than clever, line saving constructs.

In JS sometimes chain two or three inline-arrow-functions specifically for readability. When you read code, you often search for the needle of "the real thing" in a haystack of data formatting, API response prepping, localization, exception handling etc.

Sometimes those shorthand constructs help me to skip the not-so-relevant parts instead of mentally climbing down and up every sort and rename function.

That being said, I would not want this sentiment formalized in code guidelines :) And JS is not C except both have curly braces.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-04-07 10:43:55+00:00
> One thing that open source libraries do tend to miss is that very important extra metadata - for example, Phase One IIQ files have an embedded sensor profile or full on black frame that is not yet encoded into the raw data like it typically is for a NEF or DNG from many cameras.

In astronomy/astrophotography the FITS format[1] is commonly used, which supports all these things and is, as the name suggests, extremely flexible. I wonder why it never caught on in regular photography.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS
by dragandj | 2025-04-07 10:44:20+00:00
Than any silly idea can be a business model. Suppose I collect dust from my attic and hope to sell it as an add-on on my neighbor's lemonade stand, with a hefty profit for the neighbor, who is getting paid by me $10 to add a handful of dust in each glass and sell it to the customers for $1. The neighbor accepts. It's a business model, at least until I don't run of existing funds or the last customer leaves in disguist. At which point exactly that silly idea stops being an unsustainable business model and becomes a silly idea? I guess at least as early as I see that the funds are running up, and I need to borrow larger an larger lumps of money each time to keep spinning the wheel...