MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasode | 2025-05-06 10:05:53+00:00
>"Self-dealing [...] convert some government supported PhD thesis work [...] the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work [...]

Your 2001 essay isn't a good parallel to OpenAI's situation.

OpenAI wasn't "publicly funded" i.e. with public donations or government grants.

The non-profit was started and privately funded by a small group of billionaires and other wealthy people (Elon Musk donates $44 million, Reid Hoffman, etc collectively pledging $1 billion of their own money).

They miscalculated in thinking their charity donations would be enough to recruit the PhD machine learning researchers and pay the high GPU costs to create the AI alternative to Google DeepMind, etc. Their 2015 assumptions about future AI development costs were massively underestimated and now they look like bad for trying to convert it to a for-profit enterprise. Instead of a big conversion to for-profit, they now will settle with keeping a subsidiary that's for-profit. Somewhat like other entities structured as a non-profit that owns for-profit subsidiaries such as Mozilla, Girl Scouts, Novo Nordisk, etc.

Obviously with hindsight... if they had to do it all over, they would just create the reverse structure of creating the OpenAI for-profit company as the "parent entity" that pledges to donate money to charities. E.g. Amazon Inc is the for-profit that donates to Housing Equity Fund for affordable housing.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-06 10:06:26+00:00
I guess that's a problem for a lot of us who learned to program as teenagers. A big reason programming felt good for me is precisely because it let me do interesting and impressive stuff myself, and not collaboratively. There were very few kids who had even remotely similar interests to me back then - and that's true in adulthood too, outside of work contexts. While on the job, my projects may be collaborative in nature, but after hours, there's very few people among my family and friends who'd even be interested in doing a small software project, much less capable of doing so.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-05-06 10:07:50+00:00
> Kubernetes is simply too resource-intensive to run on a $10/month VPS with just 1 shared vCPU and 2GB of RAM

To put this in perspective, that’s less compute than a phone released in 2023, 12 years ago, Samsung Galaxy S4. To find this level of performance in a computer, we have to go to

The main issue is that Kubernetes has created good API and primitives for managing cloud stuff, and managing a single server is still kinda crap despite decades of effort.

I had K3S on my server, but replaced with docker + Traefik + Portainer - it’s not great, but less idle CPU use and fewer moving parts
by writebetterc | 2025-05-06 10:08:31+00:00
It's a bit annoying that there is a standard desugaring of all of this, but there's no actual way of implementing this sugaring yourself. I guess you could have a token macro (or whatever they're called) at the top scope and do it yourself?

Anyway, my conclusion is that in order to learn Rust you can't use any syntactic sugar the language provides, those are 'expert features'. There's no way I'd be able to figure out why this happens. Do rust-analyzer provide a way of desugaring these constructs?
by regularfry | 2025-05-06 10:08:33+00:00
We really, really need something to take Whisper's crown for streaming. Faster-whisper is great, but Whisper itself was never built for real-time use.

For this demo to be real-time, it relies on having a beefy enough GPU that it can push 30 seconds of audio through one of the more capable (therefore bigger) models in a couple of hundred milliseconds. It's basically throwing hardware at the problem to paper over the fact that Whisper is just the wrong architecture.

Don't get me wrong, it's great where it's great, but that's just not streaming.
by articsputnik | 2025-05-06 10:09:03+00:00
In times of AI Writing, writing manually is more important than ever. As with many AI Generated texts, I’d rather see the prompts, it would have more soul and character than the output.

I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of this article.

Writing yourself, _writing manually_ is much nicer, to hear your unfiltered thoughts, than condensing them through an LLM, and get average-sounding sentences with no soul. To me, LLM writing is soulless. I even started to turn to Grammarly and Copilot, as these were a mere distraction to the actual task at hand: writing. Instead of writing, I was constantly grammar fixing, and ultimately, nothing got done. I love the gym-analogy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803 gave.
by throw101010 | 2025-05-06 10:09:29+00:00
That’s not how logic works. The GP is applying the precautionary principle: when there’s even a small chance of a catastrophic risk, it makes sense to take precautions-like restricting who can build superintelligent AI, similar to how we restrict access to nuclear technology.

Changing the premise to "superintelligence is the only thing that can save us" doesn’t invalidate the logic of being cautious. It just shifts the debate to which risk is more plausible. The reasoning about managing existential risks remains valid either way, the real question is which scenario is more likely, not whether the risk-based logic is flawed.

Just like with nuclear power, which can be both beneficial and dangerous, we need to be careful in how we develop and control powerful technologies. The recent deregulation by the US admin are an example of us doing the contrary currently.
by indigo945 | 2025-05-06 10:09:44+00:00
This is hard to pull off in 12 weeks of full-time work for someone who is already a CS grad, absolutely impossible for anyone who doesn't already have that (or equivalent) experience.

Building a C compiler alone can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 20 years, depending on your acceptance criteria.

Why are we coding in so many different languages? Write the compiler in Haskell, why?

Also, why does this link to a half-finished attempt at solving the challenge, rather than the challenge itself? [1]

[1]: https://github.com/geohot/fromthetransistor
by daveliepmann | 2025-05-06 10:10:12+00:00
No: a Turkish keyboard has separate i/İ and ı/I keys, and Türkish-writing users with an American/international keyboard use a keyboard layout with modifier keys so that the i/I key can be altered to ı/İ. (I do the latter for idiosyncratic reasons.)

The person you're replying to is pointing out that differentiating English-i from Türkish-i requires some other unwieldy workaround. Would you expect manufacturers to add a third key for English i, or for people with Turkish keyboards to use a modifier key (or locale switching) to distinguish i from i? All workarounds seem extraordinarily unlikely.
by rollcat | 2025-05-06 10:11:16+00:00
I'm starting to think Zig's strategy to memory management is generally friendlier to a developer. If a function needs to allocate memory, it must take an allocator as a parameter. If it needs scratch space to perform computation, it can use that allocator to create an arena for itself, then free it up before it returns (defer). If it returns a pointer, the caller should assume the object was allocated using that allocator, and becomes the owner. It may still be unclear what happens to a pointer if it's passed as a parameter to another function, but I'd normally consider that a borrow.

It's a lot of assumptions, and if you trip, Rust will yell at you much more often than Zig; and it will likely be right to do so. But in all seriousness, I'm tired of the yelling, and find Zig much more pleasant.
by shakna | 2025-05-06 10:11:26+00:00
> It's annoying to be bad at tracking ownership and guess what: most people are. The ones who aren't have decades of experience in C/C++ and employ much the same techniques that Rust guides you towards.

You wouldn't need to do that here, in SPARK, or Oberon, or just about any other memory safe language. This is unique to Rust, and their model - and it absolutely is not required for safety. It's not a skill issue. It's a language design problem.
by mathgeek | 2025-05-06 10:11:40+00:00
> Nowadays everyone just gets email notifications on their phone anyways right?

Not everyone does. It's a typical 80/20 problem (the 80% being those who use the technology that's easy to develop for, the other 20% being the hard part). 80/20 not being the exact numbers, obviously.

That being said, you certainly don't _have_ to cover more than one way of sending notifications, but that's a decision to be made and the consequences acknowledged.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-06 10:13:27+00:00
> you can make a business with a great product

Depends on the market reach. A product struggling due to scale (a good problem to have: Like WhatsApp c. early 2010s during New Years) and a product that mostly does not do what it should (the very many dead WhatsApp clones) are very different things.

> a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient

I remember the time Skype was pre-installed on popular Androids (including the Kindle Fire) and yet couldn't compete with the likes of Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat (which also came pre-installed). Think MSFT was that soft landing that broke that resilience.

> So you can have multi-day world-headline outages ... unicorn scale

I mean, us-east-1 is a prime example ;)
Show HN: AnuDB– Backed on RocksDB, 279x Faster Than SQLite in Parallel Workloads
by hashmak_jsn | 2025-05-06 10:13:31+00:00
We recently benchmarked AnuDB, a lightweight embedded database built on top of RocksDB, against SQLite on a Raspberry Pi. The performance difference, especially for parallel operations, was dramatic.

GitHub Links:

AnuDBBenchmark: https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDBBenchmark

AnuDB (Core): https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDB

Why Compare AnuDB and SQLite? SQLite is excellent for many embedded use cases — it’s simple, battle-tested, and extremely reliable. But it doesn't scale well when parallelism or concurrent writes are required.

AnuDB, built over RocksDB, offers better concurrency out of the box. We wanted to measure the practical differences using real benchmarks on a Raspberry Pi.

Benchmark Setup Platform: Raspberry Pi 2 (ARMv7)

Benchmarked operations: Insert, Query, Update, Delete, Parallel

AnuDB uses RocksDB and MsgPack serialization

SQLite uses raw data, with WAL mode enabled for fairness

Key Results Insert:

AnuDB: 448 ops/sec

SQLite: 838 ops/sec

Query:

AnuDB: 54 ops/sec

SQLite: 30 ops/sec

Update:

AnuDB: 408 ops/sec

SQLite: 600 ops/sec

Delete:

AnuDB: 555 ops/sec

SQLite: 1942 ops/sec

Parallel (10 threads):

AnuDB: 412 ops/sec

SQLite: 1.4 ops/sec (!)

In the parallel case, AnuDB was over 279x faster than SQLite.

Why the Huge Parallel Difference? SQLite, even with WAL mode, uses global database-level locks. It’s not designed for high-concurrency scenarios.

RocksDB (used in AnuDB) supports:

Fine-grained locking

Concurrent readers/writers

Better parallelism using LSM-tree architecture

This explains why AnuDB significantly outperforms SQLite under threaded workloads.

Try It Yourself Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDBBenchmark cd AnuDBBenchmark ./build.sh /path/to/AnuDB /path/to/sqlite ./benchmark

Results are saved to benchmark_results.csv.

When to Use AnuDB Use AnuDB if:

You need embedded storage with high concurrency

You’re dealing with telemetry, sensor data, or parallel workloads

You want something lightweight and faster than SQLite under load

Stick with SQLite if:

You need SQL compatibility

You value mature ecosystem/tooling

Feedback Welcome This is an early experiment. We’re actively developing AnuDB and would love feedback:

Is our benchmark fair?

Where could we optimize further?

Would this be useful in your embedded project?
by Swenrekcah | 2025-05-06 10:13:45+00:00
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. I said it is not new but the scale and pervasiveness and especially the personal targeting is new.

And yes, that is what misinformation is, lies and falsehoods presented as news.

Remember, honest reporting of events can emphasise different aspects. That is well and good. It’s the dishonesty and disregard for truth that makes misinformation.

> "Misinformation" is just as dangerous as "well informed". Much of what we now collectively know as a species was once wrong according to some powerful historical consensus.

This is just like saying that ignorance is just as good as education because sometimes theories are invalidated when better information comes along. So why bother at all then, kind of mindset.
by PixelForg | 2025-05-06 10:13:53+00:00
> There is nothing stopping you from implementing your idea in (for example) Python. Or Javascript. Or Java, C#, C++, etc

Except there is, my brain :), that's one of the constraints I'm talking about, I'm a frontend web dev and I only know JS/TS, and like some frontend web devs, I'm enamored by Rust because it seems so different. I already use JS/TS at work so I want to use something else for my personal projects. So I definitely would have to learn something new.

> You gotta make the call - are you interested in building $IDEA, or are you interested in learning $NEWLANG?

If I was only interested in building my idea, I'd have just used what I know and used AI to accelerate the process. However for me the journey is also important, I want to enjoy thinking and writing code (and this project is something only I'd use, so there's no hurry to release a prototype). The problem is I want to start writing code right away, but that has the issue that I've mentioned above (gaps in knowledge).

Nobody is at fault, other than me for setting these constraints for myself. I know the solution is to just suck up and go through the rust book, read a chapter daily and eventually I'd have all the concepts in my head that I can then just focus on writing the code. But whenever I go about doing this, my mind always persuades me that there must be a better way, or it finds some flaws in my current approach and so on. So I need to learn how to not listen to my mind in such cases, and stick to the goal that I set.

Edit - After reading a reply to my comment, I've decided to just start writing the code and not worry about having gaps, anytime I start having doubts again, I'd go through this comment thread
by RS-232 | 2025-05-06 10:14:15+00:00
Subhuman is a rather severe (and incredibly reductionist) judgement. Sure, being anti-free lunch for children is morally objectionable… but they’ve failed to probe that line of reasoning. They’ve encountered a bug, but instead of debugging it, they’ve closed their IDE and walked away.

Sometimes an honest conversation—with carefully placed, introspective questions—can be revealing to all parties. When we use our tongues to learn about others and build them up rather than tear them down, we’re actively making the world a better place. When we resist the tendency to judge others, we’re actively bettering ourselves.
by c0n5pir4cy | 2025-05-06 10:14:20+00:00
Good enough is the problem. We've got Windows, Mac, Android, IOS and Linux clients and the only platform it seems to work on over 95% of the time is Windows; but unfortunately it's free and 95% of the users are on Windows so it's what we use.

I think the EU were right with their antitrust case.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-05-06 10:14:46+00:00
I liked the Skype Out function allowing you to call any phone from the Skype app using whatever WiFi or data you could find while traveling.

If anyone’s looking for the same functionality without anything complicated I did some research and ended up with the Viber app. It’s a social network which you don’t have to use at all, and provides the same function as Skype Out to call regular phones.
by fxj | 2025-05-06 10:15:15+00:00
There are still several companies who build it. Get one from Doepfer (German Manufacturer) here and connect it to a modular system or a semi-modular synth like a mini moog.

https://www.thomann.de/de/doepfer_a178.htm

https://doepfer.de/a178.htm

live in action: https://youtu.be/1mIferngPqY

or from stylophone:

https://www.thomann.de/de/duebreq_stylophone_theremin.htm

live in action: https://youtu.be/NNn-se0S4Ww
by cess11 | 2025-05-06 10:15:20+00:00
A few days ago you posted comments where you questioned whether it was appropriate to apply lessons from the Holocaust when interpreting contemporary state policies, and that some Wikipedia "spree" convinced you that it wasn't appropriate.

This likely means that you consider current starvation campaigns with exterminationist aims more defensible than 'der Hungerplan' and Vernichtungskrieg of the Holocaust. To me this makes you "one of the baddies". The attempt to exterminate the palestinians or the attacks on sudanese refugees and civilian infrastructure or the bombing campaigns against civilian targets in Yemen are, in principle, at least as indefensible as the starvation tactics of the german eastern advance during WWII.

Those responsible should ideally be brought to the ICC or related tribunals and tried for their crimes. You disagree, judging from your comments in that thread.

What would it take to change your mind?
by boomlinde | 2025-05-06 10:15:54+00:00
German has an 'ß' problem of a similar nature. There is a corresponding capital "ẞ" in Unicode, and Germany has officially adopted 'ẞ' as an alternative since, but in Unicode's SpecialCasing.txt the upper of 'ß' is still 'SS'. The lower of 'S' of course being 's', there's no going back after folding to upper cases. Lower of 'ẞ' is however still 'ß'.

So by alternating case you end up with ß→SS→ss or ẞ→ß→SS. Certainly has potential to screw with naive attempts at case-insensitive comparison via case folding. Then again, Unicode adopting 'ẞ' as the upper of 'ß' in some future version would probably only increase that potential further.

I'm interested to hear from people dealing with a lot of German text how much of a problem this is in practice.
by scoutt | 2025-05-06 10:16:36+00:00
You are not fighting the C++ compiler or showing why the C++ compiler might be annyoing. You are introducing a bug by poorly using a library (which has nothing to do with writing and compiling C++). Ergonomics I believe are fine?

I'm struggling hard trying to understand what or if your comment has anything to do with GP's comment. Perhaps you wanted to tell that the Rust compiler might have stopped you from producing a buggy program, but again, it has nothing to do with GP's comment.
by prepend | 2025-05-06 10:17:20+00:00
I’ve never met anyone who chose to use Teams. My organization forces me to use it. I don’t like it, but to its credit, it is better than “Skype for business.”

It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort of doing away with it for something new.

Is there just not a financial model here? Cheap to run and lots of users but no money. Skype seemed to be profitable back when I would use it for international calling.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-05-06 10:17:23+00:00
My guess is that for the VCs and PMs at Teams, it is easier to play politics and ensure your product is tightly integrated and coupled with other MS products, than to build an actual quality product.

It speaks of the culture at MS really, but it's amazing how a revenue and cash rich company can keep a dogshit product going.

I despise teams, all my colleagues despise teams, all my friends despise teams. It's a product that all users hate with amazing uniformity. But MS bundles it with Office, which makes demure and uninspired IT departments use it because it's less work.
by arkey | 2025-05-06 10:17:56+00:00
> Some people are able to integrate things like alcohol, porn or whatever other moral sin of the week without negative effects on their life or relationships. These things aren't addictions for many people and there is also no value in making sweeping generalizations.

A generalisation in itself. And I find your username interesting, given your comment.

Banter aside, there is A LOT of scientific literature about how porn is literally a damaging drug-like addiction.

It's like saying smoking is not bad for some people because they can quit whenever they want. Well, lucky them, but maybe they should, because having that capacity doesn't mean their lungs aren't getting irreversibly vandalised.
by rvba | 2025-05-06 10:18:21+00:00
Teams is a winning product.

It is not the best, but it offers just enough and is good enough that you dont want to spend on a separate dedicated product.

Especially as teams comes as a part of a bundle and is integrated with it.

I hate skype's interface (the is just so bad, even sharing screen), I also hate the sharepoint integration, but reality is that if you look at costs you will use it

Different thing is that windows 11 taskbar now has space for 11 windows open.. wow this is bad for any officr work
by betteryet | 2025-05-06 10:19:53+00:00
Neon is a great product because they are run by Postgres enthusiasts. They have decent customer-friendly pricing, real serverless HTTP endpoints, and they're always on the latest version of Postgres as soon as it is stable. From what I can tell, no other provider has this positioning, driven by dedication.

I really hope they can maintain this dedication after acquisition, but Databricks will probably push them into enterprise and it will lose the spark. I wish Cloudflare bought them instead.
by lazide | 2025-05-06 10:21:06+00:00
Maybe in the modern era, specifically since 1848, but [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries].

“The young men who went off to fight, and sometimes die, in foreign service had several incentives—limited economic options in the still largely rural cantons; adventure; pride in the reputation of the Swiss as soldiers; and finally what military historian Sir Charles Oman describes as a pure love of combat and warfighting in and of itself, forged by two centuries of conflict.”

Either way, being a mercenary is explicitly the opposite of ‘fighting for your country’, which is the point I was making.
by dwattttt | 2025-05-06 10:22:56+00:00
I dunno; I've never tried Zig before, and it wasn't hard to check whether this kind of bug was easy to have:

const std = @import("std"); pub fn main() !void { var gpa: std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{})=.{}; const alloc=gpa.allocator(); var list = try std.ArrayList(u8).initCapacity(alloc, 1); const a = try list.addOne(); a.* = 0; std.debug.print("a={}\n", .{a.*}); const b = try list.addOne(); b.* = 0; std.debug.print("a={}\n", .{a.*}); std.debug.print("b={}\n", .{b.*}); } a=0 Segmentation fault at address 0x7f9f7b240000
Seven tools is all you need. Open source AI agent
by SafeDusk | 2025-05-06 10:23:11+00:00
Hi HN,

This is an agent framework I'm using myself for coding and various tasks. AI has gotten good enough that it can do a lot of tasks given simple but right tools which are composable.

These seven tools are most of what I need to get work done: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, think.

Just looking to share and hope others find it useful, check it out at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami.

Curious what are the main actions that is most useful for you?
by ljf | 2025-05-06 10:23:44+00:00
Agree - if my 10yo son was in charge of getting his own food for school from our well stocked fridge, I know he'd struggle to get any kind of balance.

I know from friends in education who see kids come to school who have had to try to find food to bring in. I live in a relatively well off area but kids still come to school with stuff like just dry bread or a single cereal bar as there just isn't anything to hand for them to bring in for school - looking after their kids welfare isn't a given for a sad and sizeable minority.