MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-05-21 09:50:37+00:00
As another poster has said, around 2000/2001 there were many PC motherboards for which the maximum RAM capacity was 640 MB of SDRAM (though depending on the motherboard the capacity limit could have other values, e.g. 512 MB or 768 MB were other frequent values). Only around 2003, motherboards where you could install up to 4 GB of DDR memory became widespread.

I had a few such motherboards, with Pentium III "Coppermine" and with AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" (with 3 DIMM sockets, 2 accepting 256 MB modules and 1 accepting 128 MB modules).

While I had initially equipped them with less memory, i.e. either 128 MB or 256 MB, because of the high cost at that time, eventually I had maxed up the installed memory to 640 MB on the Athlon motherboards.

At that time, the memory controller was not included in the CPU, but it was contained in an external chip, the Northbridge. The MB chipsets could come from various vendors, including Intel and Via. Depending on the chipset, different maximum amounts of SDRAM could be supported. Sometimes there were also limits for the maximum amount of RAM caused by the L2 cache controller, due to the size of the tags required in cache lines. Even with the same chipset, the MB manufacturer could choose to route different numbers of address lines to the sockets, probably depending on whether the extra capacitive loading caused by a bigger memory module would have allowed it to function at the rated speed on that PCB.

64 MB would have been a typical maximum memory around 1998 (2 sockets for 32 MB SDRAM modules, on a MB with an AGP socket for the graphics card), so if the author would have had that year in mind, you would be right.
Show HN: Supatab.app – A Chrome extension that helps to chat with multiple tabs
by naimur103 | 2025-05-21 09:50:42+00:00
I’m a software engineer and I often have 10+ tabs open when I’m reading stuff or doing research. I used to keep switching between them, copy-pasting, and trying to remember where I saw something. It was slow and messy.

So I built a Chrome extension called Supatab (https://supatab.app). It’s like ChatGPT for your browser tabs.

Here’s how it helps me:

• I can ask questions about the pages I’ve opened

• It gives quick summaries of long articles or docs

• I can find important points without reading everything

• No more switching between tabs all the time

It’s been saving me a lot of time, especially when I’m trying to understand new topics or write up notes. Thought I’d share in case anyone else deals with the same problem.

In case you are interested to try here’s the link: https://chrome web store.google.com/detail/supatab/paegfcicdclnmbkedpnanmnhchfbalfa?utm_source=item-share-cp
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-05-21 09:50:50+00:00
Abstracting away from any particular grid regulatory environment, distributed solar and batteries make sense and make more and more sense as the cost reduces.

Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.

In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.

Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.
by jaapz | 2025-05-21 09:51:32+00:00
1kW continuously is 8760kWh per year. To compare, my house used 6200kWh in total over 2024, including heating.

Your toaster draws 1kW for maybe 5 minutes a day, which is maybe 30kWh per year.

The power in this comparison is not important, it's the total energy consumed (which is what you are billed for in the end).
by KingOfCoders | 2025-05-21 09:51:43+00:00
Yes and no.

No because, Firn and Harsch are words on their own.

Yes, because of the way the German language works. It tends to create new words by combining old words not by creating new short words (Dialects like Bavarian work differently though, they often tend to create new words).

Then after centuries people forget that and think it's one word. Like "Enttäuschung" (disappointment) which people no longer realize what the two words are and that "Enttäuschung" really means that you had been deceived ("Täuschung") and now are not longer - the deeper meaning of "Enttäuschung" in German. Same for "Werkzeug" (Tool) - the words get their own identity.

What I found most interesting was Rücksicht, Vorsicht, Nachsicht, Einsicht, Weitsicht (and more) where probably no German would think they are the same word, "Sicht" combined with another one. All of those words have their own, distinctive identity.
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-05-21 09:52:18+00:00
I think what you’re describing is caused by the fact that people that would previously pursue law, medicine or some other high paying field now pursue software engineering because it pays well and is a pretty comfortable job overall.

The nerdy tinkerers stay the same and AI empowers them even more. Are they rare? Yes. But this shifts the topic from science/engineering to economics/sociology. Granted, that was the topic of the original submission but for me that’s the less interesting part.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-21 09:52:37+00:00
That applies with inelastic goods - land for example - where supply can't increase

Assuming the base cost is 8k

Supplier A and Supplier B charge 15k and have 100 customers between them, making 350k each

Supplier B decides to undercut Supplier A, and charge 14k, and get all the customers, making 600k profit

Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
by cess11 | 2025-05-21 09:52:42+00:00
I can't speak for other people but I regularly work with code that is not owned by my organisation and getting approval to send it out to some remote, largely unaccountable, corporation is likely to be impossible under the conditions which we operate.

Together with the CEO I've also decided that we do not do this with our own code, it stays on machines we control until someone pays for some artifact we'd like to license.

I'm well aware that many other organisations take a different position and push out basically everything they work on to SaaS LLM:s, in my experience defending it with something about so called productivity and something about some contract clause about the SaaS pinky promising to not straight up take the code. But nothing stops them from running hidden queries against it with their in-house models parallel with providing their main service, and sift out a lot of trade secrets and other goodies from it.

It's also likely these SaaS corporations can benchmark and otherwise profile individual developers, information that would be very valuable to e.g. recruiting agencies.
Show HN:RevMax – Revenue OS for AI Agents (Seeking 25 Pilot Partners)
by vijay_gorfad | 2025-05-21 09:53:00+00:00
Hi HN

I’m Vijay Gorfad (3× CTO turned founder). After wrestling with margin leaks at multiple AI-agent startups,where I built billing stacks and outcome-based pricing engines finally I launched RevMax, an end-to-end “Revenue OS” for AI-agent businesses. We’re live with 3 pilot partners.

What RevMax does: Launch any pricing model (outcome, usage, tiered, hybrid) in minutes—zero redeploys Pinpoint every AI cost (LLM tokens, GPU-seconds, vector DB, TTS/STT, telephony) at the task level Visualize real-time margins per agent, workflow, customer, even per API call Automate order-to-cash: invoicing, dunning, global payments, ASC 606-compliant RevRec

Early results → pilots see an avg 22% margin lift in 30 days. We’ve run 50+ founder interviews and iterated fast on feedback.

Now onboarding 25 pilot partners for our next wave of early adopters. Get instant sandbox access, a free margin audit, and help shape our roadmap.

https://userevmax.com

I’d love your feedback and to partner with 25 HN founders—drop a comment or DM me!

Vijay Gorfad Founder @ RevMax AI
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-21 09:53:11+00:00
They do struggle with that, or rather some developers struggle with not making assumptions about the way a user's window manager is laying out their windows?

I use StumpWM, and for the few applications that this becomes a real problem it is possible to run those in a floating windows group that works just like a minimalistic non-tiling window manager. I think this is a common features of tiling window managers.
by seydor | 2025-05-21 09:53:59+00:00
What is non-creative work? I think the term reeks of elitism. Every job is creative, even picking up garbage can become an art when one puts effort in it.

There is a more sensical distinction between work that is informational in nature, and work that is physical and requires heavy tools in hard-to-reach places. That's hard to do for big tech, because making tests with heavy machinery is hard and time consuming
by derektank | 2025-05-21 09:54:45+00:00
I'm pretty sure YouTube saves the metadata from all the video files uploaded to it. It seems pretty trivial to exclude videos uploaded without camera model or device setting information. I seriously doubt even a tiny fraction of people uploading AI content to YouTube are taking the time to futz about with the XMP data before they upload it. Sure, they'll miss out on a lot of edited videos doing that, but that's probably for the best if you're trying to create a data set that's maintaining fidelity to the real world. Lots of ways to create false images without AI
by aatd86 | 2025-05-21 09:55:13+00:00
That's a lack of financial sense. In finance, we learn about the time value of money. Code allows someone to go faster. This is literally a repository of time. So it is valuable.

When I look at coders, I sometimes get the sense of them being akin to financial anarchists. Maybe the word is harsh but how can they devalue themselves so much!?

That's beyond me. Nerds, you deserve better. (especially non US based ones)
Show HN: Free OSINT API to profile Reddit users
by r00m101 | 2025-05-21 09:56:02+00:00
Hey HN, I’m the creator of R00M 101, a free API for Reddit OSINT. It turns usernames into profiles, pulling risks, interests, and activity patterns from public data. Basic API use is free. All public Reddit data, GDPR-compliant. I’d love your feedback—what do you think?
by dgimla20 | 2025-05-21 09:56:21+00:00
I really think society is sleepwalking into a ton of problems with mass media consumption (mostly by the phone, and of which Instagram is one component). We are not supposed to be filling every gap in our lives with videos, games, music, and short-form content.

It is okay to be bored and let your mind wonder every now and again. It fosters boredom, which in turn fosters creativity. It also boosts the enjoyment of the (lower amount of) media you do consume and stops you becoming numb to it and seeking out more dopamine constantly.

It is clearly having an effect on people's attention span, stunting people's ability to focus, and affecting their performance, not just in work, but in many areas of their lives.

Maybe the city I live in is an isolated case, but most people walking from place to place are looking at their phone while doing it. I see people walking their dog or pushing their baby prams while staring at their phone (this is supposed to be bonding time). When I go to the gym, there's a whole column of people walking on treadmills (even on a sunny day) because this allows them to prop the phone up on the treadmill or hold the phone and watch videos. The 3-5 minute rest between sets on machines, benches and free weight areas is now a video watching period. Sometimes people are just doing a low-weight easy load with the phone resting on their crotch.

Even if people aren't looking at the screen, a lot of the time they have earbuds in listening to something. Is it a war on silence and letting the mind wander?

Why can people not unplug? Surely by now it's proven that short form video content is stunting people's attention span, making it hard for them to read even a page of a book. How are these people going to competently hold down a job or pursue a hobby? What happens in 20 years when people have been conditioned like this for 2,3,4+ decades. Are we going to have a serious breakdown in mental health, early signs of dementia or Alzheimers?

Damn companies like Instagram for taking part in this, as Google, Meta, Reddit, Spotify and whoever else has. Their desire to occupy ever more of our attention and time is leading this charge.
by includenotfound | 2025-05-21 09:57:37+00:00
Indeed. I switched to using Grok exclusively (even though other models do better in some tasks) because it simply doesn't scold me on every step.

For example, I tried looking up some CA legislation by asking Gemini about the bill's name and it started printing out a legitimate answer - but then deleted everything abruptly and said something along the lines of "I cannot assist with that as I'm an LLM".

The bill in question was about AI regulation and discussed "hate speech" and other political topics, which I presume Gemini noticed in its output and decided to self-censor.

Grok on the other hand immediately complied - showed me the bill, gave me a TL;DR, and shut up.

Another example is: I found a bunch of old HDDs from old laptops. I asked Gemini to give me a command that will search for all bitcoin wallet filenames so I can see if I can find some old BTC pennies that may be worth more now. Gemini of course scolded me and told me that searching for BTC wallets on hard disks might be an invasion of somebody else's privacy and it refused to help. Grok on the other hand cooperated and shut up.

And yes, I might have worded my prompt carelessly (e.g. "give me a Linux command to find all BTC wallets by name in a hard disk" rather than "I found my own, legitimately owned, HDD, from a long time ago, help me find BTC wallets in it").

But I shouldn't have to walk on eggshells talking to smart sand, and I won't.
by ionwake | 2025-05-21 09:57:44+00:00
if I wasnt around to witness it over the last 10 years I would have thought most commenters on HN were bots pretending to be offended and gatekeeping for obscure profit motives.

So the bad news is people are just insecure, jealous, pedantic, easy to offend, highly autistic - and these are the smart ones.

The good news, is with dead internet theory they will all be replaced with bots that will atleast be more compelling make some sort of sense.
by genericresponse | 2025-05-21 09:57:47+00:00
The key difference in the markets is that it takes a very long time to build more apartments and houses, especially in France. There also isn't an option to not have housing. (Low elasticity) That keeps the short term supply effectively static. Same amount of supply, increase in money spent, inflation.

In a market like solar, there is production of more solar systems. There are also multiple readily available substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers, keeping net price stable.
by thatwasunusual | 2025-05-21 09:58:25+00:00
As the saying goes: if you don't know if you need something or not, you probably don't need it. :)

I have been using .NET (and LINQ) for many years on a daily basis, and I've yet to run into performance problems that can't be fixed by either rewriting the LINQ statement or do some other quick workarounds.

But will I try out ZLinq? Sure, but I won't create anything that depends on it.
by usrbinbash | 2025-05-21 09:59:07+00:00
> What other system of value are you using here? Bottle caps? Nostalgia?

The system where "production" means "where has item XYZ actually been made".

And for more than 1/3rd of all items, the answer to that question is: China.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/china-worlds-sole-manufacturi...
by raddan | 2025-05-21 09:59:31+00:00
These are absolutely spot on. I worked as a programmer having been a self taught coder. There were important things I just did not understand. A good example is how to gauge the runtime complexity of a program. I did not know what I did not know. Looking back at the code I wrote then—eek!

I hit another wall later in my career and that drove me to go to grad school. I met some folks there who clearly leveraged their CS knowledge (eg, people who were solving niche compiler problems “for fun”) and I realized that there was a lot more to CS than the stuff I had learned on my own. So I stuck with CS and never went back.
by liendolucas | 2025-05-21 10:01:21+00:00
> ...and many buildings use millions of gallons of water (often fresh, potable water) per day in their cooling operations.

This is outrageous. People still struggle to access fresh water (and power), but hey "sustainability is all to our company" is always promoted as if something nice is being done on from the behemoth's sides. BS. What a waste of resources.

I truly condemn all this. To this day I do still refuse to use any of this technology and hope that all this ends in the near future. It's madness. I see this as nothing more than next-gen restrictive lousy search engines, and as many have pointed out ads are going to roll soon. The more people adopt it the worse will be for everyone.

I always emphasize this: 10-15 years ago I could find everything through simple web searches. Everything. In many cases even landing on niche and unexpected but useful and interesting websites. Today that is a difficult/impossible task.

Perhaps there is still room for a well-done traditional search engine (haven't tried Kagi but people in general do say nice things about it) to surface and take the lead but I doubt it, when hype arrives especially in the tech industry people follow blindly. There are still flourishing "ai" startups and from night to day everyone has become a voice or expert on the subject. Again: BS.

Traditional web engines and searches were absolutely just fine and quite impressed with their outputs. I remember it. What the heck has happened?
by srean | 2025-05-21 10:01:38+00:00
On similar lines the MAX operator on the random variables become PRODUCT operator on its distribution.

It's fun to play with the (Max, +)algebra of random variables and infer it's distribution.

This turns out to be quite useful in estimating completion time of dependant parallel jobs.

Spawning multiple parallel jobs becomes a Max operation and chaining sequential jobs becomes a '+' operation on the completion times. This expression tree of Max'es and Plus'es can be algebraically processed to obtain bounds on the completion time distribution.

One example is the straggler problem in mapreduce/Hadoop. In the naive case, the completion time is the max of each parallel subtask. (*)

If the tasks have a heavy tail, which sometimes they do, the straggler's completion time can be really bad. This can be mitigated by k-out-n set up, where you encode the problem in such a way that only k out of n jobs need to finish to obtain the final result. One can play with this trade-off between potentially wasted computation and expected completion time.

For heavy tailed distributions another simplification is possible. The tails of Max and + start becoming of the same order, so one can switch between convolutions and products.

(*) This shows up in microservices architectures also. The owner/maintainer of a microservice end point might be very happy with its tail latency. However an end user who consumes and composed the results of the endpoints can experience really bad tail latencies for the final output.
by garganzol | 2025-05-21 10:03:22+00:00
Interesting approach, but it should be .NET Runtime (or JIT) who would optimize small memory allocations preferring the stack rather than the heap when possible.

.NET 10 takes a step in that direction [1].

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotn...
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-21 10:03:39+00:00
A public Github repo existing makes absolutely no guarantee that the code and configuration in the repo is what the owner of the repo uses in production.

And of course they only have one commit. There's no history of how we got here. We don't get to see what happened with the South Africa prompt additions.

Additionally, no new commits have been made since the initial commit. Maybe they haven't made any changes whatsoever in the 5 days since, but the longer that goes on, the less believable it is that this is at all reflecting what they're actually using.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-21 10:03:40+00:00
Of course but the EU thinks it’s a better strategy to engage with China which remains a major partner to move the needle in the right direction rather than burn bridges. There are a lot of tools which could be used to limit the impact of Chinese surproduction and push China towards shoring up its internal market.

The US used to do the same and will hopefully be sane again in three years.
by hansmayer | 2025-05-21 10:03:52+00:00
While I strongly agree that frontend development roles will definitely be in less demand, especially for those devs who decided long ago make a hard cut after whatever comes beyond the browser/client code, as those tasks were always fairly trivial...Sam Altman also said that "we know how to build the AGI" some time ago. Meanwhile, we are in what, year 4 or 5 of the hype and ~year 20 of the ML LLM models? Fighting it out with the AI-fied web search which will ocassionally give us a wrong or just dangerous recommendation. Or generate a picture of a person with 6 fingers, etc. This is not AGI and never will be. A 6-year old kid would know you dont make pizza with glue and stone, so I'd say even the frontend devs are somewhat safe here.
by barnacl437 | 2025-05-21 10:03:58+00:00
that really makes sense while it is very hard to imagine about. i have thought about this several times before too, but rather than that its for files, not just images, with the similar idea: how many distinct files can be created from a fixed file size, say, 4KB?

in fact, you "create" something when its not existed yet, or its never been perceived to exist by anyone. despite in theory everything are already in track of an algorithm, we cant really sure that its already there, or its creating enough effect to be known to exist, i.e. hardly anyone will think about it.

well, after all, whether it is "created" or "discovered" depends on the context and people's general perception about it.
by lukejkwarren | 2025-05-21 10:04:05+00:00
Thank you so very much for the detailed breakdown. The prohibitively high pricing of cybersecurity tooling is a big problem. PenZen comes in way on the low end, but this erodes trust in the brand. Tough one to navigate as I look to find my footing in the market. I wish I had a customer like you as I'd literally just build all of your feedback directly in.

Many of the points I've actually specifically catered for in my compliance report are reassuring. For example, linking CVEs, sensible layouts etc.

The application itself caters for helping actual devs triage, fix, etc., with the report catering to audit and compliance needs. I've tried to avoid baking this into the report as the tool itself allows devs to get AI remediation guidance. Dev's don't read these reports IMO but they would jump into the application and click a button to see what the fix is - I hope.

Thanks again. I appreciate the time taken to respond with such detail.