MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by carlineng | 2025-05-22 15:51:24+00:00
This is really a question of economics. The biggest organizations with the most ability to hire engineers have need for technologies that can solve their existing problems in incremental ways, and thus we end up with horrible technologies like Hadoop and Iceberg. They end up hiring talented engineers to work on niche problems, and a lot of the technical discourse ends up revolving around technologies that don't apply to the majority of organizations, but still cause FOMO amongst them. I, for one, am extremely happy to see technologies like DuckDB come along to serve the long tail.
by eyesofgod | 2025-05-22 15:51:50+00:00
Wished I would have gone to school. For the experience, for the, but honestly in a large part the opportunity as well. Too many things I'll never get a chance to do or even get the chance to figure out whether I'm capable of doing.

I also wish I had gone into any of my other interests career wise. Even if I ended up wanting to go work in software anyway, it's immensely more feasible to go from [something else]->[software] than the other way around.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-22 15:51:57+00:00
An aside, but I feel pretty old, because I remember 30 years ago quite well, and no, I don't think people (at least people in tech) would be that surprised by the miniaturization and technological advancement that has occurred. Moore's law had already been churning along for decades in 1995, laptop computers had been out for a while, people (including lots of university students) were browsing the web, and heck, there were even PDAs that could do handwriting recognition in 95.

People were already saying "Isn't it amazing that this computer that you can carry around in your hand is more powerful than a giant room of computers that NASA built to send astronauts into space" in the mid 90s, so while people wouldn't necessarily guess the details, I think they fully expected the technological advancements to continue apace.
by nabla9 | 2025-05-22 15:52:03+00:00
FYI: https://consentomatic.au.dk Browser extension that allows you to automate consent.

>Consent-O-Matic is a browser extension that recognizes CMP (Consent Management Provider) pop-ups that have become ubiquitous on the web and automatically fills them out based on your preferences – even if you meet a dark pattern design.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-22 15:52:23+00:00
> Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands...

This made me think of typing tutor programs that just prompt for random letters. I type like shit on those-- slow and inaccurate.

On the other hand, I'm quick and reasonably accurate when typing English words and frequently-used command lines.

The analogy would surely hold true with musical instruments. Even with my limited experience playing musical instruments I can't imagine trying to practice random notes and rhythms. On the face of it I would think it would have little to no value. (Effectively practicing to play unlistenable music...)
by mmooss | 2025-05-22 15:52:56+00:00
> every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it.

(Maybe I'm saying the obvious; sorry if that's the case ...) In perception, knowledge greatly affects what we 'see', on a physiological level - our brain's perceptual function is not at all purely sensory, but wired into the rest of our minds. People who have never drunk wine may say it's just unpleasant and a strong taste, and why drink it? People who know it well can perceive all sorts of things, from flavors to colors and more.

With knowledge, the wires, magnets, and electronics, like the sensations of wine, will reveal themselves. A good, passionate source can help ...
by lapcat | 2025-05-22 15:53:04+00:00
> All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years.

I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.

All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?

Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-05-22 15:53:44+00:00
generating the ideas “planets move at constant per planet velocity” “planets move at a specific speed as a power law function of distance from the sun and we fit the paramets great” “each planet sweeps equal areas in equal time” is cheap, but evaluating which idea is good is expensive, and the whole value of that evaluation is captured in the final idea
by palmotea | 2025-05-22 15:54:01+00:00
> You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.

Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.
by lubesGordi | 2025-05-22 15:54:28+00:00
See this is interesting to me. I understand the desire to dynamically allocate buffers at runtime to capture variable size deltas. That's cool, but also still maybe technically unnecessary? Because like you say, at 4k and over 8MB per frame; you still can't allocate over a limit. So likely a codec would have some boundary set on that anyway. Why not just pre-allocate at compile time? For sure this results in a complex data structure. Functionally it could be the same and we would elide the cost of dynamic memory allocations. What I'm suggesting is probably complex, I'm sure.

In any case I get what you're saying and I understand why codecs are going to be dynamically allocating memory, so thanks for that.
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-22 15:54:45+00:00
In all honesty it wouldn't even matter.

If the data brokers sell data, then even if they didn't sell it to the government, they would sell it to "PR/Lobbying Firms" who lobby the government. They would sell it to "security contracting firms" who the government contracts with to, um, escort "aid" shipments to widows and orphans in places like Yemen or Colombia, or Nebraska. And so on and so forth.

The fundamental mistake was never about the government. The fundamental mistake was in allowing the data brokers to exist, collect, and sell the data in the first place.
by entuno | 2025-05-22 15:54:51+00:00
Qualifications are an interesting one, because they seem to be something that gets very little regard the development space.

Other areas like IT security or systems/network administration have tons of different qualifications/certifications that you can take, aligned to specific roles and career paths. Whether they're actually any good is another question - but at least there is some kind of structure there. And there are some attempts being made to further formalise it, with bodies like the UK Cyber Security Council establishing a professional register and chartership status.

But I don't think I've never met a developer who's talked about any programming-related certifications that they have. I'm sure that there must be some out there, but they don't seem to be widely used or respected.

And I suspect that any attempt to formalise the industry and require people to get certified to specific standards would result in a lot of pushback.
by crabbone | 2025-05-22 15:55:08+00:00
Multiple-step unit tests are easier to modify to only slightly change the behavior, which is usually too hard to do with property-based testing where small changes to initial input cause huge changes downstream.

But, in general, yes, unit test failure with many steps would've been just as difficult to interpret.

My experience though was that once such a difficult failure is encountered during property-based testing, one has to write a unit test to reproduce the error anyways. But it's hard to assess the probability of the unexpected behavior of being an actual bug. Sometimes you discover that the system behavior was underspecified, or that you misunderstood how the system is supposed to behave after reading the specification.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-22 15:55:24+00:00
Might be just sampling error? (10 taxis isn't a lot of taxis). Most electric taxis I see in Dublin are VW id3/4. (Though Toyotas seem to be on the rise now that Toyota has grudgingly released an EV; taxi drivers have always loved Toyota.)

EDIT: Yeah. So far this year, the id.4 is number 18 overall, Kia EV3 is 26th, Tesla Model 3 is 27th, Tesla Y is 86th. So Telsa's... not quite irrelevant, EV-wise, but kinda getting there (note that Hyundai, Kia, VW, BYD etc all have a bunch of models vs Tesla's two models, and Tesla's still trailing). https://stats.beepbeep.ie
by albertzeyer | 2025-05-22 15:56:08+00:00
> Google's first LLM to use diffusion in place of transformers.

But this is a wrong statement? Google never made this statement? You can have a Transformer diffusion models. Actually Transformers are very standard for all of the discrete diffusion language models, so I would expect Gemini Diffusion also uses Transformers.

Edit Ah sorry, I missed, this was already addressed, also linked in the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057939 Maybe my remaining post is still useful to some.

The difference is, it's an encoder-only Transformer, and not a decoder-only Transformer. I.e. it gets fed in a full sequence (but noisy/corrupted), and it predicts the full correct sequence. And then you can iterate on that. All frames in the sequence can be calculated in parallel, and if you need only a few iterations, this is faster than the sequential decoding in decoder-only models (although speculative decoding also gets you some speedup for similar reasons). Those discrete diffusion models / encoder-only Transformers are usually trained with BERT-like masking, but that's actually an active field of research. It's really a pity that they don't provide any details here (on training and modeling).

I wonder how this relates to Gemini. Does it use the same modeling? Was the model checkpoint even imported from Gemini, and then further finetuned for discrete diffusion? Or knowledge distillation? Or is it just branding?
by leptons | 2025-05-22 15:56:12+00:00
This post is about a JAVASCRIPT in-browser video editor. Not AI. But somehow AI fanbois insist on inserting their favorite hacky tech into every conversation, like they own stock in it.

No, I do not want AI automagically editing my home videos for me. It does not know the moments that are important to me as well as I do. To suggest that AI will somehow do a wonderful job at that is ignoring how bad current AI really is. It's become a running joke.

I'm glad someone else downvoted your comment because I can't.
by skissane | 2025-05-22 15:56:23+00:00
A natural moon of a moon is called a subsatellite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsatellite

At present, purely theoretical: we don’t know of any. They are probably quite rare, but we don’t really know - maybe, in centuries to come, we’ll know of dozens of examples; maybe, there are none to find in this entire galaxy
by devgoth | 2025-05-22 15:56:50+00:00
im toying with the idea of maybe releasing more features in a premium upsell (one time $0.99 purchase or something like that). still ironing that out.

i release ios apps under an LLC in hopes that one day an app will make money and i would rather that be associated with an LLC.

good question on past dates! i will fix that :)
by kvemkon | 2025-05-22 15:57:18+00:00
It's a pity, Hotspot is abandoned in Debian. Just because of policykit [1]. The package seems to be rather easy to maintain (it has a tiny rule file, small control and only 2 patches).

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1025573
by rsynnott | 2025-05-22 15:57:41+00:00
Nah; BYD are subject to tariffs, and they haven't brought their lowest-end stuff to Europe. They're not particularly cheap, and don't as far as I know compete on at all in the sub-30k space. This is really a story of (a) BYD rising from a low base and (b) Tesla plummeting; the biggest manufacturer at the moment isn't either of them (it's VW AG).
by cookiengineer | 2025-05-22 15:58:22+00:00
You should dig into ~/.local and what happens there. I'd never store my keepassxc database file in my home folder if I were you.

Apps need sandboxing, because the linux/posix philosophy of separation through users and groups for each process doesn't really work in the modern day and how graphical software works.

Firejail's approach comes close to "sane" user sandboxes, but technically that's the job of the init daemon (pid 0), there's just no GUI for systemd sandboxes yet that's easily usable.

Podman is also really nice as a user-facing sandboxing daemon.
by lubesGordi | 2025-05-22 15:59:03+00:00
Still you don't necessarily need to have dynamic memory allocations if the number of deltas you have is bounded. In some codecs I could definitely see those having a varying size depending on the amount of change going on in the scene.

I'm not a codec developer, I'm only coming at this from an outside/intuitive perspective. Generally, performance concerned parties want to minimize heap allocations, so I'm interested in this as how it applies in codec architecture. Codecs seem so complex to me, with so much inscrutable shit going on, but then heap allocations aren't optimized out? Seems like there has to be a very good reason for this.
by AnonC | 2025-05-22 15:59:34+00:00
Can someone else who’s more of an expert or well read in the area explain the following to me? I thought quantum computing requires very low temperatures and highly controlled environments, and that’s why it’s not commonly available (cost is, of course, another huge barrier). In this case, does the satellite conform to those requirements or is it something else? Do both the sending and receiving systems conform to those physical requirements? Can this system be deployed almost anywhere on earth at a low cost?

Other than money, what are the non-negotiable requirements for such a system to be deployed and to work as expected? What is the exact breakthrough here?
by nh23423fefe | 2025-05-22 15:59:57+00:00
This is exactly what I think and believe about my day to day experience of what value I produce.

Yes I know how to code and passed the whiteboard interview. I don't write lots of code everyday because that's not what the business wants from me. The business wants me to understand a large blob of legacy services and act like a normal human when someone in product ask for a change that I don't understand yet.

The main thing I believe AI is going to help me with is making decisions under uncertainity by processing large amounts of data and producing a context/environment that I am faster in.

Other people are going to drown in that context and be unable to act. My value is my decision making ability and my ability to talk to humans and find out what they want.

My value is not the production of text.
by teknopaul | 2025-05-22 16:01:01+00:00
"This is nuts: it’s akin to saying that the milli- prefix should have different meanings depending on whether we’re talking about meters or liters."

Were were here recently with "mega": Sometimes mega is squared as in megapixels. Sometime not as in megabytes.

No biggie.

Db in audio is a relative scale and that makes perfect sense. If you mixer goes + or - 6db that makes sense but can't be measured as power, your mixer might not be plugged in to any speakers so relation to real power is moot in the digital realm.

3 eq bands with -+6db makes sense too. Doesn't need to be precisly specified to be of immediate value, +-12db is clearly something else and users know what.
by ak217 | 2025-05-22 16:01:30+00:00
Agreed. The intent is good, but there are recurring problems that arise because of insufficient communication between the distro package maintainers and upstream, insufficient domain experience, or both. I think the solution is to set stronger expectations about what kinds of customizations maintainers should be making (in general, fewer than they make today), how to communicate with upstream, and more code review.
by daveguy | 2025-05-22 16:01:43+00:00
You are confusing organoids with "growing a brain". Organoids are a handful of cells of a given type derived from pluripotent stem cells and growing together. A neural organoid is nothing at all like a brain -- not even a brain slice. It is a loose connection of cells that have just enough context to somewhat behave natively or just not croak immediately (which is what most individual stem cells do when they differentiate in a petri dish).

It's like calling a 1 bit half-adder circuit a computer.

Organoids are very interesting scientifically because we will need to start with organoids to grow any sort of biological system. And they do behave closer to native than individual cells so they can be used to research things like cell metabolism and drug response. But they are not anywhere close to an organ. And unfortunately they aren't even close enough to replace animal testing, yet.
by matteason | 2025-05-22 16:01:51+00:00
It's actually surprisingly hard to get iOS Safari to keep playing audio with the screen off.

When I made https://ambiph.one I ended up having to route everything through a MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode to trick Safari into thinking it's a livestream, which is apparently the only type of audio allowed to play in the background

Minimal demo here if it's helpful for anyone: https://codepen.io/matteason/pen/VYwdzVV
by gengstrand | 2025-05-22 16:02:13+00:00
Kotlin does not lock you in and has not locked you in to IntelliJ. About a year ago, I coded up a Kotlin service using VS Code. See https://glennengstrand.info/software/coding/csharp/kotlin for my description of that including how nice the developer experience was under VS Code. The plugin I used was https://github.com/mathiasfrohlich/vscode-kotlin which works like a charm.
by crabbone | 2025-05-22 16:02:57+00:00
When I needed to interface with SQLite from Ada, I discovered that SQLite library provided with the language lacked regular expressions, and I had to add that functionality myself. During this exercise, I learned that you can relatively easily add Ada functions to be executed by SQLite. From performance and ability to debug standpoint, I'd prefer this to a whole language runtime added to the database.

In general, I'd prefer to minimize non-SQL code that runs in the database because it's hard to reason about its implications on the already complicated planning and execution of SQL code. Especially if such code can observe or change the state of the variables involved in a transaction. I feel like to not have this feature backfire, I'd want to have a way to either disallow access to the variables, or create a framework for the foreign code where its made to comply with transaction rules and have to make promises about its own code to not violate them.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-22 16:03:10+00:00
> So all EVs on a 400km+ trip will be at the charging station 1/4 of the time.

... How many people _regularly_ make 400km trips, though? Like, the vast majority of the cars on the road at any given time are not making 400km trips, or anything like it. Some countries in Europe are not 400km across.

(Also that's probably ~4 hours driving; most people are probably stopping for a bit after that anyway).
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-22 16:03:16+00:00
It worries me that stuff like that becoming easier will lead to wacky data pipelines being normalized (pulling display output off systems and "scraping" it to get data, of dubious quality, versus just building a proper interface). The kind of crowd that likes "low code" tools like MSFT's "Power Automate" is going to love to make Rube Goldberg nightmares out of tools like this.

It fills me with a deep sadness that we created deterministic machines then, though laziness, exploit every opportunity to "contaminate" them with sloppy practices that make them produce output with the same fuzzy inaccuracy as human brains.

Old man yells a neural networks take: We're entering a "The Machine Stops" era where nobody is going to know how to formulate basic algorithms.

"We need to add some numbers. Let's point a camera at the input, OCR it, then feed it to an LLM that 'knows math'. Then we don't have to figure out an algorithm to add numbers."

I wish compute "cost" more so people would be forced to actually make efficient use of hardware. Sadly, I think it'll take mass societal and infrastructure collapse for that to happen. Until it does, though, let the excess compute flow freely!
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-05-22 16:03:53+00:00
Oh, nice! That undercuts the price of the FiiO JM21 by about half, which was the other entry-level audiophile music player I was looking at if I ever decided to splurge on one:

https://www.amazon.com/JadeAudio-JM21-Snapdragon-Bluetooth-P...
by nicholasjarnold | 2025-05-22 16:03:58+00:00
"Flood the zone" => The specific strategy put forth and now enacted by the current US admin in order to overwhelm the media's ability to cover issues and therefore by extension the ability for the public at large to keep themselves informed. It's a fundamental attack on one of the pillars of democracy. Mental bandwidth saturation is a feature here, not a bug.

Additionally, the gradual removal of personal privacy, and the normalization of it, is another attack on a democratic pillar.

It really does seem like structural cracks are widening rapidly. I too hope that our current realities cause a sort of 'wake up' to occur in the minds of those whom are too busy, deep in "my team" politics or otherwise not concerned about what's going on right now.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-22 16:03:58+00:00
> As recently shown, the median scan in Amazon Redshift and Snowflake reads a doable 100 MB of data, and the 99.9-percentile reads less than 300 GB. So the singularity might be closer than we think.

There is some circular reasoning embedded here. I've seen many, many cases of people finding ways to cut up their workloads into small chunks because the performance and efficiency of these platforms is far from optimal if you actually tried to run your workload at its native scale. To some extent, these "small reads" reflect the inadequacy of the platform, not the desire of a user to run a particular workload.

A better interpretation may be that the existing distributed architectures for data analytics don't scale well except for relatively trivial workloads. There has been an awareness of this for over a decade but a dearth of platform architectures that address it.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-22 16:04:32+00:00
I wish that, when I had kids, I had been more present for them. Not physically present, but mentally. I wish I had let them pull me out of my own world more and into theirs.

I was trying to maintain my own mental space, maintain some time to do the things that I wanted, but I short-changed them. (And skimped on part of parenting, which was my duty.) Now they're grown, and I can't get it back.

Be there for your kids. Let them have your mind for a while. They won't take it forever - 5 to 30 minutes is typical - but give them those minutes, willingly, rather than trying to defend your own mental headspace.

One of my biggest regrets.