MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tade0 | 2025-05-28 09:20:47+00:00
You've reminded me that I was taught French early enough to instinctively follow the rhythm of the language, but today that alone won't suffice if the vocabulary isn't there.

I've known Louis de Funès from Les Gendarmes and such classics as La Soupe aux choux or L'aile ou la cuisse.

I didn't know the movie you linked, but now I'm thinking I'll pick up French again - if only to hear the whole body if his work in its original language.
by zvr | 2025-05-28 09:20:54+00:00
Like others, I am also very interested in this functionality. I've used Monica (https://www.monicahq.com) before; too bad it seems abandoned.

But providing personal info to an anonymous external website is a blocking point. I've used such a service in the past, and I ended up building an encryption layer on top of it so I had friends with names like QXJ0ZW1pcyBZYWdvdQo=.

Do you consider also providing the software for people to self-host?
by anon7000 | 2025-05-28 09:21:21+00:00
There are also so many types of slow tests in web systems. Any kind of e2e test like Cypress or Playwright can easily take a minute. Integrations tests that render components and potentially even access a DB take many times longer than a basic unit test. It doesn’t take very many of the slow group to reaaaly start slowing your system down. At that point, what matters is how much money you’re willing to pay to scale your build agents either vertical or (more likely) horizontally
by skissane | 2025-05-28 09:22:09+00:00
> and the name of timezone

The problem is that can be difficult to portably determine. One wishes POSIX had an API “give me IANA time zone name for current process” which would do the needful to work it out (read TZ environment variable, readlink /etc/localtime, whatever else might be necessary)… but no, you are left to do those steps yourself. And it works reasonably well if the TZ environment variable is set, but it most commonly isn’t; readlink of /etc/localtime works on macOS and some Linux distros… but others make /etc/localtime a regular file not a symlink, which makes it all a lot harder

And that’s POSIX. Then there’s Windows which is possibly the last platform to still use its own timezone database instead of IANA’s. Now, Unicode CLDR maintains a Windows-to-IANA mapping table… but you have to ship both that table, and maybe the IANA timezone DB too, with your app, and keep them updated

I really wish Microsoft would ship the IANA database with Windows, and the IANA-Windows mapping table too, and provide APIs to query them, and keep them updated with Windows update. The core Windows OS and existing Windows apps can keep on using the legacy Windows TZ database for backward compatibility, whereas portable apps could use IANA instead if they wish
by bradfa | 2025-05-28 09:22:37+00:00
The best ones seem to be the year or two just before the launch of Crunch Labs. Decent educational content, lots of excitement for engineering and science, and no real shilling. Lots of the newer stuff feels like it was created or edited by the Mr Beast team.

Some of Mark’s cameos on other channels since Crunch Labs started have been good, though.
by masklinn | 2025-05-28 09:22:50+00:00
An Erlang process is a userland construct, but unlike “green threads” (e.g. goroutine, tasks, …) they have little to no shared memory, and the language is built around immutable values. Erlang’s “let it crash” philosophy is based around supervision trees, where a system is composed of a number of (erlang) processes, with “supervisors” overseeing worker processes, and worker crashes are automatically reported to the supervisors. As such it is common to do little to no error handling in workers, instead the worker crashes and the supervisor handles the error condition.

This is nothing you couldn’t do in other languages, but because the entire thing is built into the language and the runtime, and includes tooling to make structuring an application that way easier (“behaviours”), it’s very normal to build Erlang applications that way.

This further extends to entire machines.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-28 09:22:52+00:00
I'm starting to realize that this article was probably written by generative AI. The evidence is the rate of new articles by this particular Medium account [1]. The author has posted whooping eight articles within last 24 hours, and about 80 articles within a week. Is it humanly possible? Yes, but only with multiple authors and there is no indication of the existence of such authors. This is also possibly why the "latest" versions were not actually latest at the presumed time point. Not only a bs, but probably a generative bs.

[1] https://medium.com/@codeperfect
by tomtomtom777 | 2025-05-28 09:22:52+00:00
If I understand it correctly, all programs were coded for unbounded growth; just accept more jobs/connections until it fails.

Obviously this is a bad idea. Even in Erlang's case because while some processes may continue to function, the behavior becomes utterly unpredictable.

In the real world, we would gracefully reject jobs/connections above a certain threshold.
by concerned_user | 2025-05-28 09:24:30+00:00
I think by crash they mean program stopping execution and being unable to continue, so by that metric Erlang didn't fully crash.

Erlang is designed with a mechanism that makes it easy for external processes to monitor for crashes (or hardware failures), rather than an in-process mechanism like exception handling used in many other programming languages.

Erlang was designed with the aim of improving the development of telephony applications.

The Erlang runtime system provides strict process isolation between Erlang processes (this includes data and garbage collection, separated individually by each Erlang process) and transparent communication between processes on different Erlang nodes (on different hosts).

The "let it crash" philosophy prefers that a process be completely restarted rather than trying to recover from a serious failure. Though it still requires handling of errors, this philosophy results in less code devoted to defensive programming where error-handling code is highly contextual and specific.
by larodi | 2025-05-28 09:25:15+00:00
Note: this was already posted 3 years ago as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31970805, but HN is much more about comments, not the news itself only. So it is interesting how the community's view changed on this topic, 3 years into GPTs. In the light of say, FAANG having potentially trained llamas on this content...

also opening sentence reads: If you are interested in mirroring this dataset for archival or LLM training purposes, please contact us.
by keiferski | 2025-05-28 09:27:03+00:00
It has nothing to do with being pompous, and this attitude is precisely why none of these solutions will ever go anywhere.

If you want laws to be passed, you need senators and judges and legal scholars to engage with your ideas. None of those people are going to take the idea of “enshittification” seriously with a name like that, nor are they going to put their name on a bill referencing it. There are plenty of examples of citizen activism that lead to a bill, and these bills often are name directly after the activist/movement name.

I’ll say it again: if you want political change, accept that you need to care about the names of concepts.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-28 09:27:46+00:00
The problem is this: If you try to allow a new dense development near the suburbs and make it affordable by not having minimum parking requirements, people object to it. Not because they want to live there and need somewhere to park their car, but because they don't want local housing to be more affordable or to have a bunch of young people with lower incomes move in and want to send their kids your school district. Developers aren't stupid; the reason they're banned from building housing without parking isn't because they were going to build something nobody wanted to buy.

So then that kind of development can't get built, and the bulk of the housing consists of low density suburbs where you need a car, and then everybody drives everywhere. But instead of solving the actual problem, people start trying to come up with ways to make driving worse because they don't like all the cars. Then it's actually the drivers who object, because you're trying to suppress the thing they're forced to do without letting them do the thing that allows them to avoid it.
by ascorbic | 2025-05-28 09:28:03+00:00
Disclosure: Astro core team

Yes, the difference here is that Astro considers Starlight to be a core part of our project. We use it for our own docs, as well as it being the basis for a significant percentage of our users' sites. I've no reason to believe Docusaurus's funding is in any danger, but I think the Open Collective that pays for full time Starlight development is probably a more dependable source of funding than Meta.
by rvz | 2025-05-28 09:28:06+00:00
> Remarkably, the lone survivor wasn't Rust or Go, as many of us had predicted. It was Erlang.

This is what the Erlang VM was exactly designed for, yet these "programmers" claim to be surprised that it didn't crash under heavy load, unlike the rest?

The language runtime is what was under test rather than the language itself.

Mediocrity and hype are once again celebrated.
by dustingetz | 2025-05-28 09:29:00+00:00
yeah, i think the siren song of reducing developer cost and accelerating delivery is irresistible to boards, execs, managers, non-senior devs (all essentially semi-technical, even the nonexpert devs) but it is a mirage. The startups that over raised in the extended bubble are all drowning in tech debt and the game is to exit or get profitable faster than the tech debt compounds, it leads to a divergence in outcomes where you either build a google and buy your way out of the hole (“ revenue solves all problems”) or you don’t quite get there and your delivery ability crests and decays as the tech debt compounds above the threshold line that the company cash flow can service.

Vibe coding is going to exacerbate this - the growth can come faster, but the collapse point is accelerated correspondingly. If you plot this complexity out like we were taught in CS 101, lines of code will grow linearly, proportionate to the number of agents/devs, but the interconnectedness and therefore state space will explode polynomially without applying encapsulation and local reasoning techniques like functional programming. But we’ve aligned the models to use imperative languages (TS, Python, Java), essentially constraining the code models to specifically prevent the best code scaling techniques! And guaranteeing the emergent “spooky action at a distance” that is inherent to the computational structure of imperative languages.

And note that most companies don’t take flight like Google, instead they seek acquisition, and a lot of those acquisitions fail to integrate and get swimming, they are perhaps underwhelming compared to the sales pitch, to the extent that many start to look like a form of securities fraud? Tech debt is real, it’s just invisible to the balance sheet and therefore to boards and buyers. If it were properly accounted for, the entire IT sector would be revealed as completely underwater.
by creatonez | 2025-05-28 09:29:34+00:00
Keep in mind that Pillars of Creation is not supposed to be intentionally beautiful. It's a false color image for maximizing research value. Green for hydrogen band, red for sulfur band, blue for oxygen band. The goal of the processing is to minimize the error in these three readings, to study the ionized gas in the cloud as it truly is. If it were engineered for the public to look in awe, you could probably come up with an even more striking coloring than a simple RGB assignment. This is something a lot of people get wrong about the topic of false color images -- usually, there is not a separate "for the public" and "for researchers" image. The media outlets just pulled the coolest looking processed images out of actual research papers, and some of them were so cool looking they became cultural icons. (The exceptions to this, ironically, are when an image is intentionally processed to be as close to true color as possible -- which makes it less useful for research purposes, but fantastic for writing explainers for laymen on the topic of false color images.)

Though, you could say it's indirectly designed for beauty. When astronomers process an image, they are looking for interesting features to study. And once you've narrowed in on the most scientifically interesting way to process an image, the sorts of striking color contrasts that creates are inherently beautiful because they are unveiling the interesting parts & letting us see the unseen for the first time. And there is selection bias on what is interesting to look at. A violent explosion is both more aesthetically inspiring and teaches us more about how matter works than a picture of a random stairwell, and astronomers love their violent explosions.
by zvr | 2025-05-28 09:29:54+00:00
But this doesn't really work in long emails and threads.

Scroll a couple of screens in the message text and you see something like:

> > > > I think that ... > > No, I remember that ... > On the contrary, I believe that ...

(maybe with different colors) but you have to remember the stack/colors to decipher who is saying what.

Unfortunately I have not seen mutt coloring the index with the same colors as the quoted text, which would help a lot (if you have a view that shows the index along with the message).
by dotancohen | 2025-05-28 09:30:21+00:00
Does there exist an _objective_ method to test the sound quality difference between two files?

I could take a 54 kbs rip of Rust in Peace and reencode it at 256 kbs. It's not going to sound better than the 196 kbs rip, even though the bit rate is higher. What software would detect this? And other artifacts, such as clipping?
by trklausss | 2025-05-28 09:30:58+00:00
Yes, but you can do that with an ICE too. I achieve 60mpg//4l/100km with my diesel, also with highway driving. It's doable, but if you let your car roll for a red light, everyone is pissed at you.

The main difference is as you say: EVs brake way more when you are not pressing the throttle, before even needing to touch the brakes. It also helps with mileage.
by bwb | 2025-05-28 09:31:23+00:00
Ya, I'm already seeing a bunch disappear.

I am curious what it looks like when you need a good product review in two or three years. Is YouTube the only trustworthy source by real people? For most products, the web is just going to be Astroturfed Reddit posts and Forbes AI-written junk that didn't even have the product to test.

I'm hoping paid MCP data sets might get there, then I could make my data available there, and hopefully make a $1 to $4 per thousand requests to the data set. If that replaced the loss of Google traffic, that would be amazing.

I'd love for 25% of my AI subscription to go toward that each month, i.e., I can pull "a list of all science fiction books the NYT recommended in the 1950s" and it gives NYT a few cents to go through their data...
by 2b3a51 | 2025-05-28 09:31:59+00:00
Suggestion: Write on the right hand page and leave the left page blank (that's the back of the page if you fold the pages over).

Then go over the notes later and summarise or add details on those left hand pages. I used to do the colour pen/highlighting then.

Worked for me half a century ago. No data format problems or need for legacy hardware either.
by oliwary | 2025-05-28 09:32:00+00:00
Glad you like it! :) And thank you for your comments, super interesting! Excellent point about the rarity of the perfect arrangement. Perhaps I should throw in a few lettersets that do have a solution, I am intrigued to see if people would discover it.

My other game, https://squareword.org focuses exclusively on perfect 5x5 squares, but here the goal is to uncover it wordle-style rather than arranging it from scratch. There are surprisingly few combinations that have ten unique, common words in a 5x5 letter square!
by wiz21c | 2025-05-28 09:32:30+00:00
A debugger doesn't show you the evolution of your program over time. A few well placed prints give you that.

I use my debugger often, but sometimes you need to track the value of something over time (say, over 1000 iterations) and a debugger can't show you that.

So prints are still relevant. Debugger are more for "needle-in-haystack" stuff I think.

A debugger that could record the execution over time (and query that execution), that would be great. I know there are some, but are there for python for example ?
by Mr_Minderbinder | 2025-05-28 09:33:07+00:00
Before those came along I was perfectly content using a computer with 4 or 8 GB of RAM or less and thought that ought to be more enough for anything I wanted to do with computers for the rest of my life. Now I find myself wondering how much more RAM and what new GPU I am going to need to run a model with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. A few years ago I might have agreed with those who say the personal computer revolution has long been over. Indeed there was a long period with few new milestones or innovation. But now I see that that sentiment was mostly a failure of my (and their) imagination.
by gorgoiler | 2025-05-28 09:34:18+00:00
An unspoken truth of a monorepo is that everyone is committed to developing on trunk, and trunk is never allowed to be broken. The consequence of this is that execution must be configurable at runtime: feature flags and configuration options with old and new code alongside each other.

You can have a monorepo and still fail if every team works on their own branch and then attempts to integrate into trunk the week before your quarterly release process begins.

You can fail if a core team builds a brand new version of the product on master with all new tests such that everything is green on every commit but your code is unreleasable because customers aren’t ready for v2 and you need to keep that v1 compatability around.
by minetest2048 | 2025-05-28 09:34:30+00:00
Related problem is single-board computers that relies on USB-PD for power. USB-PD sources requires the sink to do power delivery negotiation within 5 seconds, or it will cut its power or do funny things. Because USB-PD negotiation is handled in Linux, by the time Linux boots it will be too late, and power supply will cut the power, so it will be stuck in a boot loop: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg239175.html

They way they're trying to solve it is very similar to this article, by doing the USB-PD negotiation during U-boot bootloader stage:

- https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

- https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20241015152719.88678-1-sebast...
by ajb | 2025-05-28 09:35:20+00:00
I totally agree. The term is a puerile way of "owning the cons" following Haidt's idea that conservatives have a strong sense of disgust and liberals do not. The problem is that a) many conservatives are also a potential constituency for increasing integrity in the private sector, and b) many people on the political left also have a strong sense of disgust.

Doctorow himself I think has a weak sense of disgust (a lot of his writing, and the site he used to run (boingboing) serve the market of people for whom disgusting things are entertaining or funny, so I think he has a blind spot here.
by belatwing | 2025-05-28 09:35:20+00:00
Light sets the tone. It shapes how we see, feel, and experience a space. A soft glow can calm. A bold fixture can inspire. Great lighting doesn’t shout — it speaks quietly, with purpose.

That’s the philosophy behind 50bulbs.com — a carefully curated collection of lighting and design pieces that combine simplicity, style, and everyday function. It’s not just about what looks good — it’s about what feels right in your space.

For those who believe small details make a big difference
by bambax | 2025-05-28 09:35:55+00:00
The article is very long; that part is fascinating and a fantastic suggestion:

> Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). (...) That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.

> The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. (...)

> What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. (...)

> Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more.

Europe should do this now; it would be incredibly good -- and incredibly fun.
by fzeroracer | 2025-05-28 09:36:16+00:00
But what's the financial incentive to make it DRY? The LLM services your company pays for are incentivized to ensure the output is as long and verbose as possible because they can charge more. And from an engineers perspective it does not matter because no one is reading said code, or they're just asking the same LLM to tell you what the code does. And obviously more lines of code looks better to your execs.

There are a bunch of anti-patterns both in how these services are used and sold to you.
by chneu | 2025-05-28 09:37:42+00:00
Something like 75% of trucks in the US will never be used for truck things.

The reality is Americans don't need giant vehicles (SUVs included). But we convince ourselves we're sssppeeecciiiaall.

Other countries do it no problem. Go travel then pay attention to how many giant American vehicles you see. I'll spoil it for ya: you'll hardly see them.

The reality is Americans have an insane ego problem that the rest of the world pays for. The vast majority of Americans do not need anything more than a small sized car. But again, Americans think we're ssspppeeccciiiaaal when we're really just selfish and loaded with excuses.

Also, nice racism? Jeez.
by onion2k | 2025-05-28 09:38:02+00:00
I wouldn't hold my breath for a petahertz one anytime soon.

That depends on what you mean by 'processor'. Optical systems are great at linear processing, but terrible at nonlinearity. You wouldn't want an optical processor based CPU to run Doom. Encoding something like an AI model or a codec into an optical processor would be great though.

One Google search later.. Turns out a team have made a photonic tensor processor. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03070-1 So you could have an even fast one of those.
by berkes | 2025-05-28 09:38:12+00:00
I've done that as well. The PoC worked, but the statelessness did prove a hurdle.

It enforces a pattern in which a client must do the PoW every request.

Other difficulties, uncoverd in our PoC were:

Not all clients are equal: this punishes an old mobile phone or raspberry-pi much more than a client that runs on a beefy server with GPUs or clients that run on compromised hardware. - I.e. real users are likely punished, while illegitimate users often punished the least.

Not all endpoints are equal: We experimented with higher difficulties for e.g. POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE over GET. and with different difficulties for different endpoints: attempting to match how expensive a call would be for us. That requires back-and-forth to exchange difficulties.

It discourages proper HATEOAS or REST, where a client browses through the API by following links and encourages calls that "just include as much as possible in one query". Deminishing our ability to cache, to be flexible and to leverage good HTTP practices.