MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csallen | 2025-05-25 16:30:23+00:00
I've always been fascinated by aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, and those sorts of things. What is it that makes them so enduring, so satisfying, and so seemingly true? Why are we attracted to this form of expression moreso than longer and better-argued prose? Do things merely seem more true simply because they are wittily expressed, and if so, is that a good thing? (PG's recent essay had interesting things to say about this.)

Some interesting aphorisms from the master La Rochefoucauld:

- "In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us."

- "Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples"

- "No persons are more frequently wrong than those who will not admit they are wrong."

- "We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears."

- "A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice."

- "We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones."

- "Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them."

My theory is that a good aphorism merely gives us "2+2", which prompts us to test it and conclude "4". This is much more persuasive than spoon-feeding us "2+2=4" in the first place, because we naturally trust our own conclusions more than the conclusions of others.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-25 16:31:12+00:00
I understand why you are not in a hurry but I'd like to offer a counter-argument. I have a machine powerful enough to experiment with local LLMs and interestingly enough at least some models are on a par with what OpenAI used to charge for (GPT4). It means I can experiment and see what these models are capable of, whether it makes sense to use them to solve my problem, and if not - why, and if anything can be done about it on my part. And because the API is the same, it's relatively easy.

It's not necessary to be at the bleeding edge, two steps away is also fine, but today LLMs are just another tool in your toolbelt and I reached the conclusion it makes no sense to ignore them, in spite of how irritating the hype (or, sometimes, plain lies) can be.
by throw902093290 | 2025-05-25 16:31:23+00:00
There are many ferries to Hydra, but none take cars.

My guess it is pain in arse to bring car in our out of hydra. Once someone pays arm and leg for transportation, they will keep car there forever. Even if its used for construction once a year.

Hydra is normal town with normal needs. And local population of pensioners will not haul shopping, furniture, or building materials on their backs!
by nchmy | 2025-05-25 16:32:11+00:00
How do you reconcile

"pg's writing... always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface level of introspection"

with

"when it comes to his writing style and the quality of his prose, I think he's generally top notch"?

And "Given how influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified" - do you not see a problem with equating influence/popularity with quality/truth (let alone morality)?
by chairmansteve | 2025-05-25 16:33:04+00:00
"To see an Anglo proclaiming the universal destiny of all humanity to follow the Anglo culture is just such a stirring thing".

Very woke, good for you.

I guess you forgot about ancient Athens, Rome, medieval Iceland, Venice. There are many other examples:

https://franklin.uga.edu/news/stories/2022/origins-democracy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy
by bradknowles | 2025-05-25 16:34:15+00:00
Datacenters need four things: power, water, cooling, and access to the WAN.

A dry desert environment is not very conducive to datacenter operations with regards to those first three items.

If you’re located close to the sea or an ocean, at least there’s a possibility of getting water, albeit perhaps through expensive reverse osmosis. But then you’re operating in a more humid environment where certain types of cooling systems won’t work well, because they depend on water evaporation to function.

If you’re building a multigigawatt AI datacenter, those are two types of environments that you want to avoid.

So, whether it’s Houston Texas or the UAE, I think that’s a very poor location for a datacenter.
by anton-c | 2025-05-25 16:35:20+00:00
I've struggled to make any of those into one's where I'd DM the person if I was in a rough spot or felt I could count on them. You ever manage that?

For a short time in the 2000s with my wow guild I did but that was different. It was always TeamSpeak so I felt I knew the person v discord(where i only voice chat with irl friends... so far)

I'd love to be able to make that happen. Probably my own confidence is the issue.
by Aachen | 2025-05-25 16:35:42+00:00
It won't be zero so spreading it across enough people might already solve it. If that still leads to insufficient demand during the hottest weeks, idk, it's energy, surely there's something useful you can do? Store it for next week, pre-heat water for the nearest steam engine (e.g. gas power plants are steam engines running on methane, so if they have to heat the water by fewer degrees.. The problem will be finding a steam engine close to the heat source), supply it to an industrial process that needs temperatures above ambient (egg breeding for vaccine production? Idk), create electricity from the temperature differential between this system and the Thames water using the Peltier effect

I've surely got a too naïve view of economics but if the goal were to not waste resources then there will be things you can do before dumping it into the hot summer air
by LarsDu88 | 2025-05-25 16:36:14+00:00
Adding to this, the nice thing about the bsp partitioning was you could also leverage it to make off screen monsters go to sleep or reduce their tick rate. Was helpful for optimizing AI as well as rendering. DOOM not only had some of the first pseudo 3d but also huge numbers of enemies... something that a lot of other games still cut down on
by lern_too_spel | 2025-05-25 16:36:52+00:00
You're comparing different things to try to prove something that is obviously wrong to anyone who spends a few seconds thinking about it.

> Centralised ledgers are multiple orders of magnitude more expensive (2.5% to 6%, a typical blue and white square checkout is 3.5%) versus something like $0.000025 on the most active blockchain)

I was comparing cost of recording the transaction. Think for 2 seconds. Obviously, a centralized ledger is going to be cheaper. You are comparing the cost for completing a transaction on one side with the cost of completing a transaction plus fraud fraud mitigation, chargebacks, etc. on the other.

> At their best (2-3 second confirmation) as fast as current gen blockchain networks and an order of magnitude slower than next generation (150 milliseconds block time so expected subsecond confirmations).

Same mistake. Think for two seconds. Obviously, the speed of recording a transaction on a centralized ledger is going to be faster.

Whatever you build on a blockchain ledger you can build faster and cheaper on a centralized ledger.

People fooled by crypto grifters don't have enough economics education to understand "ceteris paribus" let alone everything that comes after in an introductory course.
by jimnotgym | 2025-05-25 16:39:01+00:00
>You can't simultaneously optimize two unrelated things;

What kind of illogical nonsense is this? I found the speed my car produces the best MPG and simultaneously found the best volume for the stereo.

I suppose his overall conclusion works in one way, the article is both poorly written, and devoid of anything useful. Nobody would read it if it wasn't from pg.
by danielbln | 2025-05-25 16:39:39+00:00
You are underselling it because you make it sound like all the model adds is some foley, when in fact it adds facial animations that are in line with the dialogue spoken. Go ahead and create a Kling render that I only need to add VO to, you can't because Kling doesn't do that. You need a Omnihuman level model (or veo3) for that and it makes all the difference.

Happy to agree to disagree, but imo this absolutely is a step change.
by cableshaft | 2025-05-25 16:40:01+00:00
You can always work on video games on the side. I used to be in the video game industry, but I'm not anymore. That's what I do now.

Even before I got into the industry I was making video games on the side. The only time I wasn't making games on the side was when I was in the industry itself, as it seemed like a conflict of interest (and the contracts I signed reinforced that).
by aristofun | 2025-05-25 16:40:40+00:00
I feel you. For me when I found myself in a very similar situation I found 2 answers:

1. Full autonomy and creative freedom (ie my own thing whith no stakeholders to convince, no egghead managers to leak asses, no humiliating performance reviews etc)

2. Highly technically challenging product in a relatively small team (think building postges db vs cobbling up apis and plow through layers of legacy shit to serve another marketing agency nobody will remember in 10 years).

The 2nd is a weaker answer (doesn’t last long either, because companies like cars tend to degrade over time).

The main theme for me is having a deep connection to meaning. Having this magic “why” answered with both my mind and my soul.
by eranation | 2025-05-25 16:40:48+00:00
Keep shipping early and getting feedback. It's much better to get feedback early than to wait until everything is finished, so I don't think you should have changed a thing. My point is just in the title of the post, if you had a title talking about a framework (and saying you are planning to make it into a fully fledged game engine) that would probably get some people signing up for a waitlist etc. Looking forward for your next update!
by xp84 | 2025-05-25 16:42:30+00:00
> how would you do this then, where you reply to a specific part?

When specific context is needed, besides “the whole message” just do exactly as you and I are both doing right now. But in general, quoting the whole message is pointless unless you’re adding a new recipient on, since we all have the threads in our email clients anyway. Whenever I can, I nuke the entire quoted part out of my replies.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-25 16:44:33+00:00
Or, once sufficient junk has accumulated, a for-purpose boat could come over and transport the lot. Also, there must already be ways of getting garbage and construction debris out.

I suspect the best approach would be a boat that would transport the stuff not three miles, but a longer distance to where scrap could be more easily handled. This would amortize loading/unloading costs over more miles. I would not be at all surprised if such centralized waste handling ports already existed; there are lots of islands there generating a constant stream of refuse.
by weebull | 2025-05-25 16:44:35+00:00
I remember him as a high level BBC executive in charge of programming, but I believe he was a presenter for a long time before that, concentrating on documentaries and journalistic pieces, particularly on the arts. He had a reputation of being very good at what he did, and I believe the period he was in charge is seen as a bit of a golden era for the BBC, especially for those not from the classical Oxbridge background.
by irrational | 2025-05-25 16:45:23+00:00
I still think confabulation is a better term for what LLMs do than hallucination.

Hallucination - A hallucination is a false perception where a person senses something that isn't actually there, affecting any of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. These experiences can seem very real to the person experiencing them, even though they are not based on external stimuli.

Confabulation - Confabulation is a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage or a specific subset of dementias.
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-25 16:45:59+00:00
Much of the bloated and inefficient code out there is the result of simply pulling something off the shelf and using it, just because it 'kind of' does what you need.

Nevermind that a much simpler and efficient piece is possible, we have to ship ASAP so don't bother to spend any time on it.

Include a whole set of dependencies just because we need a function or two in a huge library or framework. Worry about optimizations later (i.e. never).
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-05-25 16:47:04+00:00
This is the last time I felt the power of the propaganda machine. (The most recent time was the 2024 election) It was so obvious to myself and my friends that this was completely cooked up intelligence. And yet the truth was not getting out, and had fooled many people with this strange groupthink, almost like a dumb, braying herd animal, where the collective intelligence was utterly ambushed and tied up in a sack. I don't like feeling powerless, yet I have this feeling that our voices have been smothered of late, destroyed by ridiculous talking points.
by andrewingram | 2025-05-25 16:47:41+00:00
I haven’t used Rive myself, but have been following its progress. Notably, the creator of Lottie joined the Rive team a couple of years ago. It’d be on my shortlist for tools to evaluate in this space.

I’ve personally pushed against the use of Lottie in projects I’ve worked on due to the file sizes being very difficult to justify for the kinds of animations that our designers wanted to use it for. SVGator was another alternative we had success with.

One thing I’ve been very frustrated is the amount of places I see Lottie pushed with no mention of file size. ie tools like Webflow, and general advocacy from prominent figures in the tech community. I’m sure there is a sweet spot for Lottie, but I’m also convinced that there are better choices for use cases most people are using it for.
by jspdown | 2025-05-25 16:47:51+00:00
Yes exactly, each situation is different.

As a team you constantly need to assess whether a dependency should be brought in or of a re-implementation is not better.

Sometimes, the re-implementation is so specific to you actual problem that maintenance becomes almost free. A generic solution always open more doors to problems and require more effort to maintain.

For a rich client web application, you need a really good reason not to bring an external dependency such as React.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-05-25 16:48:19+00:00
i know this is HN but its 2025 and i find it hard to believe anybody who was not in a coma for the last decades would need concrete proof that for-profit corporations in the business of personals data have deals with government agencies for surveillance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
by neilv | 2025-05-25 16:49:23+00:00
Agreed, but being a small company can still work for some big-company customers, depending on how you approach it, and mostly how lucky you are.

Our super-lucky big first customer, it probably helped that we spun out of an established small engineering firm that did notable R&D work for huge companies, and also that we partnered with a huge hardware tech company, who had an evangelist who put in a good word for us at times.

And after a successful launch for a prestigious big company, we could point to that, to increase our credibility with other big companies (especially those in the same and similar markets).

For some co-design work leading to pilot we landed (intending to lead to a pilot), we worked together with their in-house product design team, on big brand-involved technology changes to their non-computers-tech advanced products, and also planned out the manufacturing and distribution logistics integration. (I think this one probably would've gotten to a pilot, after some delays, but we'd stretched our runway until it snapped, and there were various reasons we didn't get a bridge and didn't raise.)

For some prospects, we got access to CEOs or other execs, and the message came downwards to work with us. (Which seemed to nevertheless often have people below thinking in the usual CYA ways. But our foot was in the door, and our size had at least a provisional OK. Though some of those devolved into too many stakeholders being roped into meetings, which meant more use cases to be satisfied, including by people who were half-hearted about it, and this probably wasn't on their KPIs.)

Other prospects included smaller companies in some categories (e.g., a founder grew a sustainable business designing and making a high-quality physical luxury product). I think those were probably fine with us being small, and that they liked the direct access and our willingness to work with them and adapt to what they needed. The challenge there might've been finding PMF with a customer who understood every aspect of their company, who feels every dollar, and who didn't get where they are by introducing costs and complexity they weren't sure they had to. (By contrast with large companies as customers, anyone who's had to use some of the products of enterprise SaaS purchases knows that large companies aren't always that discerning in what they spend money on or what complexity they introduce.)

Bigger companies were also easier for one of our sales tactics, because their products had the popularity and volume to show up significantly in some bespoke data acquisition stuff from osint that we developed, which we used to prepare reports for cold call prospects that showed a money-losing problem they had, which maybe they didn't know about.
Show HN: Structured JSON Prompts for AI Image Generation
by caeser | 2025-05-25 16:49:45+00:00
I've been experimenting with structured approaches to text-to-image generation with chatgpt and google imagen 3.0 and built two complementary tools:

image-json-gen: A simple ts to create structured image prompts as JSON for generative models. generation-schemas: An evolving schema spec to standardize and validate image generation prompts across tools.

The goal is to move away from messy natural language prompts and toward reproducible, composable, and tool-friendly formats.

Useful for devs building image pipelines, creative tooling, or anyone who wants stricter control over prompt structure.

Feedback, ideas, and contributions welcome. Cheers!
by pdonis | 2025-05-25 16:49:52+00:00
> Those aren't different claims.

Yes, they are. The first claim (the one he backs away from) is A implies B, where A = "this writing is beautiful" and B is "this writing is true". The second claim is Not A implies Not B. Those are not logically equivalent. The second claim is logically equivalent to B implies A, i.e., "this writing is true" implies "this writing is beautiful". But B implies A is not equivalent to A implies B.

> If writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, it is necessarily the case that writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right.

No, it isn't. It could also be the case that both types of writing, sounding bad and not sounding bad, are less likely to be right (because, say, sophistry is very prevalent).

What is necessarily the case is that, if writing that sounds bad is less likely to be right, writing that is right is less likely to sound bad. Which, as above, is not logically equivalent to "writing that doesn't sound bad is more likely to be right".
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-25 16:50:00+00:00
No. The actual competency of AI won't matter. Lots of corporate executives will prioritize short-term cost savings, with little concern for the degradation for essential systems. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining the systems that users and society rely on. That's part of the reason why the current hype is blown way out of proportion by these people. Because who has faced consequences for behaving this way?
by somenameforme | 2025-05-25 16:51:10+00:00
There's a problem there. Many people reason about things by assuming that since option A is clearly bad, option B must be more desirable. But in life we often have this fun situation where we get to choose between a bad choice, and a terrible one - there is no good one.

Saddam was, without any doubt, an at-times brutal tyrant. Yet not only was Iraq vastly more stable and peaceful under his reign, but so too was the entire Mideast. That war set off a chain reaction of events that led to a complete destabilization in the Mideast and created a fertile ground for extremist groups to recruit, operate, and generally thrive.

So I don't think so. Like in most contemporary wars, the only real winners are the arms dealers, and the people getting rich off death and destruction.
Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig
by caeser | 2025-05-25 16:52:14+00:00
I built zli, a batteries-included CLI framework for Zig with a focus on DX and composability.

Key features:

- Typed flags with default values and help output - Rich formatting, and layout support - Command trees with isolated execution logic - It’s designed to feel good to use, not just to work. - Built for real-world CLI apps, not toy examples.

Would love feedback, feature ideas, or thoughts from other Zig devs.

repo here: https://github.com/xcaeser/zli
by Aurornis | 2025-05-25 16:52:17+00:00
> The forced move to CSS and the constellation of other "standards" still hasn't caught up to what Flash once offered us.

Hard disagree. Modern web apps can be amazing within the browser alone. Look at Figma or OnShape as class leading examples.

I think you’re also misunderstanding Lottie: For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about. It works well, too, so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-25 16:52:19+00:00
> On the other hand, my wife has lived the American dream. Homeless as a teenager, knows what hunger is, but now, as a 47 year old woman, has a successful career, happy family, and comfortable lifestyle.

I escaped teenage homelessness with help - like the rest of the few who do.

I next did all the bootstrappy things (>20y of long self-employed hours). Finally made just over basic bills servicing auto dealerships when the housing crash ended that.

Pivoted to medical clients and started rebuilding but then the ACA supercharged local medical practice closures so I pivoted to geothermal. But then a wealthy partner cleaned out the company and it shuttered.

Meanwhile spouse's mental health issues steadily worsened. During the above I increasingly became her caregiver and ~sole parent to 5. She needed long-term, inpatient care but it's only available to the wealthy or as state-run hellholes for select incarcerated.

Outcome was hunger level poverty throughout the 2010s, for me + kids. We only escaped it because kids became old enough to work. Just in time for the 4-income economy.

We live together now because that's our single option. Spouse was in the Rockies, last I heard.

Moral of the story, the strongest drivers of success are always factors beyond our control. Will and effort follow somewhere behind that.
by malwarebytess | 2025-05-25 16:54:59+00:00
The section on proverbs is missing the point, despite overthinking it.

You're not meant to take a proverb and apply it literally in all cases. It's a piece of wisdom you pull out when you deem it appropriate. The analysis and individual judgement of the human being is implied.

If you included more it wouldn't be a proverb.
by echelon | 2025-05-25 16:55:56+00:00
> so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.

Because we are.

If you've ever used Flash, you know how easy and accessible it is to create.

The results were 100% portable and even downloadable. You could treat flash files like gifs or pngs.

The web document standards don't work that magically. They have never lived up to what you once could do.

> For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about.

Gross. I want a single, self-contained file that I can open on my computer without having to open a browser. Not an assortment of JavaScripts and css files.

Anything can be a "standard". The web standards are way too big. And they've accumulated decades of baggage.