MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgb23 | 2025-05-22 13:42:52+00:00
That sounds very careless. Not only does this break an obviously deliberate feature, it also violates the robustness principle. Whether one likes it or not, it’s a guiding principle for the web. Most importantly this „fix“ was bad for its users.

Good intentions, but unfortunately bad outcome.

There was a somewhat recent discussion on here on how OS projects on GitHub are pestered by reports as well. Some athors commented that it even took away their motivation to publish code.

It’s always the same mechanism isn’t it. The „why we can’t have nice things“ issue. Making everything at least slightly worse, because there are people who exploit a system or trust based relationship.
by beerandt | 2025-05-22 13:43:03+00:00
Between snap and having completely different network implementations between "desktop" and "server" versions really made me fall back down the learning curve of nix.

Especially since I was novice at best before the systemd thing, and my Ubuntu dive involved trying to navigate all 3 of these pretty drastic changes at once (oh yea and throw containers on top of that).

I went into it with the expectation that it was going to piss me off, and boy did it easily exceeded that threshold.
by szarnyasg | 2025-05-22 13:43:08+00:00
AWS started offering local SSD storage up to 2 TB in 2012 (HI1 instance type) and in late 2013 this went up to 6.4 TB (I2 instance type). While these amounts don't cover all customers, plenty of data fits on these machines. But the software stack to analyze it efficiently was lacking, especially in the open-source space.
by remram | 2025-05-22 13:43:23+00:00
I didn't get that reading the article. The author acknowledge that ratios are useful, but that there are specific problems in how we use this unit and how we picked and express the reference scales.

> On the face of it, the idea makes sense.

Your specific example is a pure ratio so there's no problem with it (there is no reference). Apart from the fact that I have to guess whether you are measuring volts or watts through your cables, of course...
by K0balt | 2025-05-22 13:43:27+00:00
There is a few more details, especially of the early days, on my extremely neglected and out of date blog https://vivavistadelmar.wordpress.com/blog/

Also, yeah, I know. Wordpress wasn’t a great choice even years ago when I set up the blog, but I was going to self host as a static site “soon” anyway and I needed to get started… almost good enough is the mortal enemy of adequate.
by braza | 2025-05-22 13:44:11+00:00
> History is full of “what if”s, what if something like DuckDB had existed in 2012? The main ingredients were there, vectorized query processing had already been invented in 2005. Would the now somewhat-silly-looking move to distributed systems for data analysis have ever happened?

I like the gist of the article, but the conclusion sounds like 20/20 hindsight.

All the elements were there, and the author nails it, but maybe the right incentive structure wasn't there to create the conditions to make it able to be done.

Between 2010 and 2015, there was a genuine feeling from almost all industry that we would converge to massive amounts of data, because until this time, the industry had never faced a time with so much abundance of data in terms of data capture and ease of placing sensors everywhere.

The natural step in this scenario won't be, most of the time, something like "let's find efficient ways to do it with the same capacity" but instead "let's invest to be able to process this in a distributed manner independent of the volume that we can have."

It's the same thing between OpenAI/ChatGPT and DeepSeek, where one can say that the math was always there, but the first runner was OpenAI with something less efficient but with a different set of incentive structures.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-22 13:44:53+00:00
> The long sticks typically radiate in the plane normal to the stick, i.e., if you make them all perfectly vertical, they are focused to the same floor.

I generally recommend just maximizing angles between them, i.e. 90° between 2 or 3 antennas. Wall attenuation & reflections will equalize it out, and you have a lower chance of dead zones. The ≥4th one —on the same radio— is YOLO. Annoyingly enough, for some devices they don't tell you which antenna is on which radio.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-22 13:45:15+00:00
The rate of improvement in terms of range has been glacial however so that might be a long way off.

Current range is more than adequate. The missing piece is public fast recharge stations.

A 30 minute recharge on a 600 mile trip is not a real issue. You probably take a break anyway for food, rest and bathroom. Most people can't last 10 hours without it.

Like or not, electric is not only viable now but also inevitable --- mainly due to economic forces, some of which remain to be fully developed. And Walmart and BP/Waffle House are leading the charge with plans to add public recharge stations to their locations.

https://theevreport.com/bp-pulse-waffle-house-boost-ev-charg...

https://insideevs.com/news/757648/walmart-ev-charging-networ...
by Aachen | 2025-05-22 13:45:32+00:00
> this has many benefits, the main one being that chaining gain/attenuation in a system is just a case of adding the db values together. 'We're loosing 4db in this cable, and the gain through this amp is 6db, so the output is 2db hotter than the input'.

I'm not a sound engineer, so to check my understanding: would this not be the case for any other scale indicator?

If you have a cable that loses 4m and you're sending 6m into it, you'd not get 2m out?

(The m being milli here, as in millivolts or whatever unit would be useful here — leaving it unspecified to keep the comparison to dB as close as possible)
by vaxman | 2025-05-22 13:45:34+00:00
> Funny story. I learned a lot of life lessons from VMS.

I did too, but the lessons have nothing to do with the incredible platform. There is this fictitious scene in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" where young Billy boasts that it doesn't matter if DOS is NOT better than Mac. That's the lesson I learned IRL as some kid who grew up in the shadow of the USSR carrying around Andy Tanenbaum's "Dinosaur" book (featuring MINIX) and downloading free "layered applications" and utilities for it from some socialist ahole (with tenure at MIT) over the Internet, filled a vacuum created by all the cash being sucked out of Technology by the dot-com crash..just about the exact same time that a now exposed group of losers in Santa Clara allegedly stole the plans to DEC's Alpha chip, enabling them to breath incredible life into the then very dead architecture that is only now being eclipsed by ARM. (Ironically, the settlement with DEC involved the Santa Clara losers having to buy DEC's Hudson FAB that included StrongARM --bit the Santa Clara losers were such big idiots they first spun that off into a subsidiary and then sold the subsidiary, only to have it all come back and kick their arse here in 2025). No, you can't make this stuff up and I'm sorry if they don't teach it in the circular referencing blogger sphere.
by uxdrew | 2025-05-22 13:46:19+00:00
Point-Of-Sale (POS) Terminals are an essential way to make payments in the real world. Countless brick-and mortar businesses use POS terminals to capture card payments and facilitate other payment methods such as cash payments via a voucher or QR code. The latest terminals also support contactless card payments, and contactless payments using an ewallet on a mobile device.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-22 13:46:31+00:00
At least the Mel-frequency cepstrum is honest about being a perceptual scale anchored to human hearing, rather than posing as a universally-applicable physical unit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel-frequency_cepstrum

>Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are coefficients that collectively make up an MFC. They are derived from a type of cepstral representation of the audio clip (a nonlinear "spectrum-of-a-spectrum"). The difference between the cepstrum and the mel-frequency cepstrum is that in the MFC, the frequency bands are equally spaced on the mel scale, which approximates the human auditory system's response more closely than the linearly-spaced frequency bands used in the normal spectrum. This frequency warping can allow for better representation of sound, for example, in audio compression that might potentially reduce the transmission bandwidth and the storage requirements of audio signals.

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

>Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound including noise, speech, and music. Psychoacoustics is an interdisciplinary field including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, and computer science.
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-05-22 13:46:56+00:00
If it gathers enough data on you, it can theoretically figure that out. Siri "Suggestions" have been around for years, and if you go to the same place frequently on certain days/times (e.g., your workplace, a friend you visit every Saturday, places you often go to lunch) or use the same apps at similar days/times (e.g., pulling up Callsheet in the evening when you're watching TV shows or movies to do TMDB lookups), those suggestions will show up. All of those examples are real ones I've experienced. The quality is certainly variable, but it's decent.

(Of course, it's "non-LLM" AI, which isn't particularly fashionable right now, but if we really want smarter AI agents we need to stop treating all problems as solvable with large language models.)
by nyeah | 2025-05-22 13:47:07+00:00
To be fair, since we can go to +3dB out of 0dB, we could also go to 200% on a 100% scale. In the era of software it would not be completely insane to allow users to choose how their faders are marked. (It would be insane to use 3/4 of a slider's travel for the range 100% to 400%. So the locations of the markings on usable sliders would remain mysterious to %-only folks.)

Ultimately people who use this a lot would choose to become familiar with dB, as they always have. But there's no rush.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-22 13:47:47+00:00
Maybe it was all VC funded solutions looking for problems?

It's a lot easier to monetize data analytics solutions if users code & data are captive in your hosted infra/cloud environment than it is to sell people a binary they can run on their own kit...

All the better if its an entire ecosystem of .. stuff.. living in "the cloud", leaving end users writing checks to 6 different portfolio companies.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-22 13:48:34+00:00
This PDF report is referenced in the article

https://kpmg.com/kpmg-us/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2025/trust-att...

The results are largely negative, while the language in the report is strangely positive. Along the lines of - of course AI will solve lots of problems and is "the future", but yes, it might be true that the masses haven't realised that yet.

Such a strange timeline. Some of the largest ever investments into stuff people don't trust or enjoy, and still, you will have your AI future, regardless.
by koconder | 2025-05-22 13:48:45+00:00
Comet just open-sourced the Opik Agent Optimizer SDK, a new tool designed to automate and systematize prompt/agent optimization for LLM applications. If you’re tired of manual prompt tweaking, this SDK lets you run optimizer algorithms (Bayesian, evolutionary, meta-prompt, etc.) against your own datasets, regardless of framework or model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, etc.).
by anton-c | 2025-05-22 13:48:46+00:00
Bad game design stuck. Some of the connections are so obtuse youd have to be a chess computer to see the item being relevant in that way later. And plenty of chances to bone yourself early in a playthru with no fixes(undo being an option lost 1000 turns ago). Frequent sequential saves help, but I feel there's a whole article ranking the friendliness of adventure text games and I'd rank it on the meaner side, haha. They got better at avoiding those situations in their future graphical adventures(but not totally, damn bonding plant in return to zork). Not to mention the map is so immense good luck finding where you dropped the hard hat or whatever.

If u compare the zork and zero walk thru you'll get it. I love the added color and illustrations and world far more than other text games but when I finished it(I was recording) I said "this game should probably be illegal. I cant quit this quick enough!". Still nostalgic tho, and fun in that "I got thru it" way.

So I very much relate to your experience. The text parser can be picky too when you know what to do but the game has its own way of doing it. Then u miss the solution.(edit: typos)
by hedora | 2025-05-22 13:49:05+00:00
But why patch it in debian, and not file an upstream bug?

It’s doubly important to upstream issues for security libraries: There are numerous examples of bad actors intentionally sabotaging crypto implementations. They always make it look like an honest mistake.

For all we know, prior or future debian maintainers of that package are working for some three letter agency. Such changes should be against debian policy.
by lubesGordi | 2025-05-22 13:49:08+00:00
Requiring dynamic state seems not obvious to me. At the end of the day you have a fixed number of pixels on the screen. If every single pixel changes from frame to frame that should constitute the most work your codec has to do, no? I'm not a codec writer but that's my intuition based on the assumption that codecs are basically designed to minimize the amount of 'work' being done from frame to frame.
by stickfigure | 2025-05-22 13:49:29+00:00
I have a large team that works in a 1.5M line codebase. Not everyone is familiar with every line, but we regularly make changes that would blow through the usable context window of LLMs (which is, in fact, much smaller than advertised).

Is a messy 1.5M lines of tightly coupled code best practice? Of course not. But it evolved over about 20 years and processes tens of billions of dollars of financial transactions. In my experience, it is archetypical of real-world software for a large successful company.

I use LLMs where I can and they're incredibly useful. But their limits are severe compared to a good human software developer and the shortcomings mostly revolve around their tiny context. Human neuroplasticity is still champion.
by wiseowise | 2025-05-22 13:49:40+00:00
Your strawman notwithstanding - yes, absolutely worth every single billion invested in it. A freaking machine can understand the text, stitch *MILLIONS* of information sources under a minute and provide me summarization of the text, resources to read about this topic and switch to completely unrelated topic if needed.

If this is not a miracle, then only true AGI is.
Show HN: Veo3.Directory – A curated collection of Google Veo3 videos
by zhangchengzc | 2025-05-22 13:50:16+00:00
I've created Veo3.Directory, a platform that aggregates and showcases videos generated by Google's groundbreaking Veo3 video generation model.

Veo3 represents a significant leap forward in AI video generation capabilities, producing remarkably realistic and creative content. As these videos have been appearing across the internet, I wanted to build a central repository where people could easily discover and explore the possibilities of this technology.

The directory features: - Collections of Veo3-generated videos - Information about the prompts used (where available) - Regular updates as new examples emerge

The directory is built using Next.js and Tailwind CSS, and is hosted on Vercel.

The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/sing1ee/veo3-directory

This is a passion project aimed at documenting the evolution of AI video generation and providing inspiration for creators interested in exploring this technology.

I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improving the directory!
by wiseowise | 2025-05-22 13:51:16+00:00
> If LLMs were even 50% as good as they're pretending to be we'd see huge productivity increase across the board, we simply don't, and it's been almost 3 years since chatgpt was released now. Where is the productivity increase ? Where is the extra wealth generated ?

I certainly did. You won’t see any of it, because I use it to work less, not more.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-22 13:52:08+00:00
> Most obvious example is Firefox. The Debian Project allows Firefox to update outside the packaging system, automatically, at the whim of Firefox.

No, it's not. Stable ships ESR which has its update mechanism is disabled. Same for Testing/Unstable. It follows standard releases, but autoupdate is disabled.

Even Official Firefox Package for Debian from Mozilla has its auto-updates disabled and you get updates from the repository.

Only auto-updating version is the .tar.gz version which you extract to your home folder.

This is plain FUD.

Moreover:

Debian doesn't ship pulseaudio anymore. It's pipewire since forever. Many people didn't notice this, it was that smooth. Ubuntu's changes are not allowed to permeate without proper rigor (I follow debian-devel), and it's still released when it's ready. Ubuntu follows Debian Unstable, and Unstable suite is a rolling release, and they can snapshot it and start working on it whenever they want.

I'm using Debian since version 3 too, and I still reboot or tend my system only at kernel changes. It's way snappier w.r.t. Ubuntu with the same configuration for the same tasks, and is the Debian we all know and like (maybe sans systemd. I'll not open that can of worms).
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-22 13:53:01+00:00
MAUI is cross platform for every platform most businesses care about (mobile+Windows+macOS). For the rest, there's Avalonia (and a bunch of alternatives, but Avalonia comes closest to Microsoft's systems I think).

You won't be writing visual bootloaders in plain C# any time soon, but the GUI side of C# is fine
by RUnconcerned | 2025-05-22 13:53:24+00:00
This is neat. I had a recent need to do something similar, but ended up using Grist CSV Viewer[1], which I think is a bit more feature complete. I had ChatGPT create an HTML file that would let me paste the CSV instead of loading a specific file and it worked pretty well while being more convenient than loading the CSV into Google Sheets or whatever.

[1] https://www.getgrist.com/csv-viewer/
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-22 13:54:05+00:00
That was an annual joke back then. Every year they'd present a budget that had spending increases in the first couple years, "balanced" by cuts in the "out years" 5-10 years in the future. Of course, the next year there would be a new budget that invalidated all the future cuts but kept the increases that had already taken effect.

Then at some point they just stopped pretending to balance it at all, and no one seemed to care much.
by Aachen | 2025-05-22 13:56:21+00:00
> If you're specifying decibels in written form you always include the basis or you're simply being incomplete with your units. I don't understand the complaint there.

It seems that a lot of people who are specifying decibels in written form aren't aware of what you just said

Did you ever see someone use p as a unit and expect anyone to understand it means pico? Because I've seen that with dB. In this very thread. You really don't have to look far for the tendency for dB to be used as incomplete unit

> See also, the Richter scale

Looking at the article and trying to substitute Richter, I can't imagine what you'd plug in the different positions:

- it's not a derivative of another relative unit (no decirichter)

- it was not originally meant for something else (dB was originally meant for power, leading to difference in meaning of dB in dB(V) vs. dB(W), if I'm understanding the article correctly)

- it's not trying to indicate the magnitude of the actual unit (you don't specify Richter-Volts or something, just Richter, so you can't forget to specify the actual unit)

- there aren't different meanings depending on the field you're in (a –45dB microphone is mentioned in the article as referring to Volts whereas an acoustic 10dB loudness difference is apparently in Pascals; Richters are always Richters)

The article criticises a lot of dB's aspects but I'm not sure the exponentialness is one of them
by _kb | 2025-05-22 13:56:52+00:00
> volume sliders start at 0 dB and then go down to negative $MUCHO, until complete silence at -Infinity. And then this same unit is also used to measure how loud my coffee machine is.

They're not the same unit, at all.

The audio software is a skeuomorphism from an analogue mixing console that is applying a change to a signal. 0 is unity gain and deviation from this describes an amplitude variation. This is important, as it means you are either discarding information by lowering the level and reducing dynamic range, or interpolating new information (/ decreasing SNR) by applying gain. This is less important today with floating point, but has strong historical reasons for existence across both analogue and digital domains.

If you look at an audio power amp, you will likely have some form of positive number as this is applying gain. Depending on the context this may have some specific meaning or it may be a screen print of a Spinal Tap logo and the numbers 1..11. These are all just UI decisions and part of doing that well is presenting coherent information for the target user group.

When you're talking about an acoustic noise source this is dB SPL which is a quantifier against a physical reference. That reference level quantifier is omitted a lot, which leads us to a lot of the angst in this post and the comments here. These are precise measurements, with very specific meaning. Their expression is often sloppy, but the units aren't to blame.

(excuse me while I got "full HN" here - I appreciate the irony in this response noting your first few sentences)

The reason people respond strongly to comments like this (or those about Git, or Rust) is because details matter. When you immerse in a domain, you learn the reason for those details. That does not mean things can't be improved, but this also does not imply those details can be removed or are wrong. A lot of the world, particularly when working outside of the bounds of a computer, depends on necessary complexity.
by cess11 | 2025-05-22 13:57:10+00:00
Or you nest your queries:

select second from (select 42 as first, (select 69) as second);

Intermediate steps won't be stored but until queries take a while to execute it's a nice way to do step-wise extension of an analysis.

Edit: It's a rather neat and underestimated property of query results that you can query them in the next scope.
by vel0city | 2025-05-22 13:57:34+00:00
> Microsoft controls the OS, the feature, and the update pipeline

So then this is true whether or not Recall exists, because Microsoft could have gathered this data either way. They could decide tomorrow to have Explorer siphon off that data, they could have Edge siphon off that data, they could have Windows update siphon off that data. Microsoft could have silently been doing this the whole time.

If you don't trust Microsoft with Recall, you shouldn't trust Microsoft with any of it. And you probably should have moved off Windows a long time before.

> MS is structuring and indexing your private data at the system level

This has been going on for a long time. Once again, if you don't like the idea of Microsoft running software in a Microsoft operating system to read your files you really shouldn't be running Windows, and shouldn't have been running Windows for decades.

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

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