MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wtallis | 2025-05-01 18:58:20+00:00
Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite.

Aside from crippling ad blockers, are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions, or is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact?
by wolrah | 2025-05-01 18:58:43+00:00
> They literally invented smart phones

iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007.

Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphone 2002" which you should be able to guess when that came out. You could buy a variety of devices in a vertical mostly-screen format running Windows Mobile for years before iPhone was even getting hinted at.

The main thing the original iPhone did for the smartphone market is popularizing capacitive multitouch screens that work well without a stylus.

> and app stores

The iPhone not only launched without an app store, Apple (and Jobs in particular) was famously hostile to the idea of even supporting third party native apps at all, insisting that web apps would be all that the platform needed. They didn't change their tune until October 2007 when they announced an upcoming SDK, it was made available to developers in March 2008, and it wasn't actually released to users until July 2008.

One could make an argument for Linux package managers being an "app store" in the mid-90s, though if you insist on it needing to sell commercial software then the various carrier-specific software platforms for J2ME feature phones starting in the '99-00 timeframe would be it. Carrier-agnostic third-party stores started to pop up a few years later, and the first official one from a phone vendor seems to have been Nokia Catalogs for Symbian S60 in 2006.

Android also had an app store from the beginning, but the launch of the whole platform was delayed long enough that Apple managed to get iOS 2.0 out with its app store before the first Android devices actually shipped.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-01 18:59:02+00:00
The President is supposed to be "an asset". An asset of the USA. They are subservient to an institution, despite being granted certain powers and authority.

Nixon once said "If the President does it, it's not illegal", despite that being just nowhere to be found in the Constitution in any form, yet that statement caused a bunch of right wing think tanks and policy institutions and voters to agree so wholeheartedly that they spent 70 years ensuring it would become reality.

Significant portions of the Republican party have been trying to make the US a monarchy again for decades.
by mandevil | 2025-05-01 18:59:08+00:00
The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.
by hajile | 2025-05-01 18:59:11+00:00
> The case consists almost entirely of the testimony of experts and the professionals working on both sides, so I think the judge is actually very familiar with the issues at play here and I'm not sure why you came to the conclusion that this kind of expertise was not considered when its the very nature of the entirety of the case.

Those experts spent collective centuries learning their area of expertise, but the judge became familiar with everything over the course of this one trial...

> I don't need to. It is not my obligation to defend the legal system because you have your own ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.

I've provide an argument that it is not. You have provided an unsubstantiated assertion. If you aren't willing to engage, then why make the assertion in the first place?

> The issue is convincing you, an incredibly unreasonable person.

You have made zero reasoned arguments and outright refused to make any reasoned arguments, but consider me to be the unreasonable person who just won't listen to what you have to say. How does this make sense to you?

> Judges make orders. SMEs don't and can't. And lol at the idea you are suggesting that a layman jury should define these things. It is clear to me that you do not understand the role of a jury in a trial. Jury's determine disputed facts. Nothing more, nothing less.

If a judge rules that a bridge should be built, that doesn't mean they should tell the engineers how to build it. You are confusing the legal ruling with the implementation.

In this example, the engineers put in a suspension bridge and the judge got angry because it wasn't a truss bridge even though a truss bridge wasn't specified in the ruling and the judge has no real idea why one might choose one bridge type over the other.

If the type of bridge mattered, it was the judge's responsibility to talk with the parties involved and reach a decision then add that decision to the final ruling.

In this specific case, the judge should have gotten SMEs together to decide which approach was correct and included it in the ruling rather than complain that things weren't as the judge envisioned, but never even bothered to write down other than in the vaguest terms. Holding someone in contempt because they didn't read your mind is unreasonable.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-05-01 18:59:17+00:00
You can just use llama.cpp instead (which is what ollama is using under the hood via bindings). Just need to make sure youre using commit `d3bd719` or newer. I normally use this with nvidia/cuda, but tested on my mbp and havent had any speed issues thus far.

Alternatively, LMStudio has MLX support you can use as well.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-01 18:59:26+00:00
It is not a key prerequisite for "thinking". It's "I think therefore I am" not "I am self-aware therefore I think".

In the 90s if your cursor turned into an hourglass and someone said "it's thinking" would you have pedantically said "NO! It is merely calculating!"

Maybe you would... but normal people with normal English would not.
by autoexec | 2025-05-01 18:59:30+00:00
Anyone who cares at all about their privacy wouldn't touch a product made by facebook in the first place. The rest of us though are screwed when we happen to be anywhere near someone dumb enough to buy these glasses. I'm sure facebook will gladly update our shadow profiles with as much data as they can whenever we're in view/earshot of these glasses. Once again they've made certain that we have no ability to opt out or "vote with our feet/wallet".
Ask HN: Have you used AI to apply for jobs? How did it go?
by givemeethekeys | 2025-05-01 18:59:32+00:00
I imagine that if jobs are getting posted by AI and resumes are being screened by AI, then it is fair game to use AI to apply for jobs.

There have been a number of fully automated job application bots popping up and I was wondering if any of you have tried them and if it eventually resulted in an interview.
by gtowey | 2025-05-01 18:59:47+00:00
> The UK government explicitly refused to make a plan of action.

Could you elaborate on that?

I would assume that it would be the responsibility of the leave campaign to provide that, but that's not the case?

I wonder, then if the mistake was to allow the leave to be executed, even if a plan couldn't be created in the time frame allowed. Maybe having an abort clause instead of jump off the cliff if the bridge isn't built yet.

Maybe the referendum should have required the government to build the plan which would be decided on later.
by Willingham | 2025-05-01 18:59:49+00:00
> She has not yet explained how Aurora is operating without a driver while still remaining in compliance with federal safety regulations.

Sounds like they require a vehicle to follow the trucks at this time, moreover, I can’t imagine that they can perform all maneuvers necessary for loading and unloading.

I do think all trucking should be automated eventually, truck driving really isn’t the best for mental health.
Show HN: The first stage of my indie game, made with my own engine, is ready
by delduca | 2025-05-01 18:59:50+00:00
Made with Carimbo, a home made (by me) 2D engine.

https://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo

The game is written in Lua.

Pixel Art by Aline

https://linktr.ee/dandelion.pixelart

Any feedback is more than welcome.
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-01 18:59:55+00:00
Nah, I'll correct the record because anyone who worked hard enough absolutely had access to "that level of resources"

My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.

Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
by dang | 2025-05-01 19:00:10+00:00
Related ongoing threads:

Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852145 - May 2025 (504 comments)

A senior Apple exec could be jailed in Epic case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859814 - May 2025 (58 comments)
by ralphc | 2025-05-01 19:00:30+00:00
Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language.

It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer

You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-01 19:00:35+00:00
And just when we think we can't make software any more inefficient, slow, and bloated, they release things like Electron, where you ship an entire browser with your app! And then when we think it can't even get worse, we have Docker and containers where we ship the entire OS with the application.

I'm looking forward to when app developers ship you an entire computer in the mail to run their text editor.
by Narushia | 2025-05-01 19:00:35+00:00
Yeah, I know about that. It's unfortunately not as snappy or usable as Chrome's, because you can't activate the search with a single key combination. The item focus behavior is also distracting: when you type in your search, the best match is not automatically focused, so you have to press the down arrow key and then press enter to activate it. In Chrome, you just press Ctrl+Shift+A, type in the search, and press enter (99 % of the time). So for the whole process, Firefox has two extra steps. It ends up being a lot because I use this feature dozens of times in a day.
by russellpompea | 2025-05-01 19:00:59+00:00
Topaz Labs | Engineers + Researchers + Product + Sales | ONSITE in Dallas, TX | Full-Time | 130-250k + equity

Topaz Labs (AI photo and video enhancement software) bootstrapped from zero to $48m in revenue most recently in 2024. We’re hiring for software engineers, PhD generative photo / video researchers, product managers, ops / support, AEs

Stack: C++ / Python

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(If you send me a personal email, please make the subject line your favorite vacation spot so I can weed out spam.)

Check out our openings at https://www.topazlabs.com/careers

Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russdrivessaabs/ ||| russell.pompea@topazlabs.com
by atonse | 2025-05-01 19:00:59+00:00
Well I had half a mind to not tell them to see what they’d say, but I also was excited to show everyone so they can also be empowered with it.

One of them said “yeah I was wondering cuz you never write that much” - as a leader, I actually don’t set a good example of how to leave quality JIRA comments. And my view with all these things is that I have to lead by example, not by orders.

With the help of these kinds of tools, we can improve the quality of these comments. And I wouldn’t expect others to write them manually, more that I wanted to show that everyone’s use of JIRA on the team can improve.
by Retric | 2025-05-01 19:01:24+00:00
To be clear, I agree the costs of work caps maximum tax rates well below 100%.

However, I was dumping government into that same cost of work category as commuting costs. It just makes more sense to work in a country where you make 100x as much even if you’re paying 50% in taxes than a failed state with zero income taxes. As such it also makes sense for governments to impose income taxes to be able to pay for things like education that improve short or long term productivity.
by rossng | 2025-05-01 19:01:29+00:00
MONUMENTAL | https://www.monumental.co/ | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full Time | Onsite

We’re creating robots that autonomously construct buildings. We design all of our hardware and software in-house in central Amsterdam, starting with autonomous bricklaying robots.

Building a robot like this means solving all sorts of interesting challenges: figuring out the robot's position with sub-mm precision; navigating autonomously around the building site; automating measurement and calibration of new robots; lots of distributed systems and so on.

Our robots are now continuously deployed on customer sites and we are earning real money as a masonry contractor. The full team is more than 50 people and we're growing rapidly to meet demand.

Our stack is mostly: Rust, TypeScript, Python, NixOS.

Some open roles:

- Software Engineer, Controls

- Software Engineer, Machine Vision

- Assembly/manufacturing technicians and robot operators

https://www.monumental.co/jobs

P.S. We're always on the lookout for very strong generalist engineers who can operate at any layer of the stack (firmware, networking, UI, application code - whatever's needed!) Drop me an email if this sounds like you.
by swatcoder | 2025-05-01 19:01:49+00:00
This may sound flippant, but one real option is to just quit doing so and not start again.

Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.

(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)
by sergeim19 | 2025-05-01 19:02:04+00:00
Oh, that's cool! I will have to read your article on scoring more carefully a bit later but I think that in short, I decided to take a simpler and more heuristic approach for now based on TRL (a well established metric) and a combination of some other factors. I also didn't want the user to consider the score too much as a kind of "divine word". In general I found that the heuristic used is OK for the given score plus/minus maybe 1 point.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-01 19:02:08+00:00
> the coworking space pays the app's company a considerable fee to manage access to the doors and audit logs and such, so it's not that it's subsidized by brainrot games.

I think you're well aware that these fees don't go toward the iOS SDK licensing/infra/staffing/security/distribution costs of the app and the App Store. That's what is being subsidized by the brainrot games.

Furthermore, there's nothing stopping that app maker from bypassing the app store and simply making a webapp, so this argument that you need an iphone to open the door is really moot. It's not the smartphone makers' fault that the door company's customers demand this product.
by bradford | 2025-05-01 19:02:22+00:00
I agreed with a lot in the article, but I was a bit baffled by the DEI name-drop in the opening.

> "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems."

Who is the author referring to here?

(I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)
by nostromo | 2025-05-01 19:02:56+00:00
It's true, I like my Granny phone. And you can choose a hacker phone if you want!

I personally do my hacking on Mac, Linux, and on my RasberryPis, in my secure home and behind a firewall. But I don't want a hacker-friendly phone holding my passwords, credit cards, social media, email, photos, GPS location, cameras, microphones, etc., with a persistent cellular connection to the internet and at constant risk of being left in a taxi or cafe. I would never put the effort into locking everything down, and I'd probably fuck it up if I tried anyway.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-01 19:02:59+00:00
> I believe a good AI friend/companion/therapist would genuinely improve most people's emotional state and greatly reduce social issues.

I think the opposite, that such artificial "friendships" are more akin to a drug that gives a short-term relief at the cost of increasing long-term dysfunction. At the very least, it poses the risk of devaluing the notion of friendship.

But, I suppose, we're going to find out.
by overfeed | 2025-05-01 19:03:09+00:00
"12 + 89" uses the latin alphabet and is in no way language-agnostic in this context. I expect borrowed constructs to appear relatively more frequently in the language they were borrowed from.

Now I'm curious how Mistral models would respond to a "language-agnostic" phrases like "Rendezvous" or "coup d'etat"
by dang | 2025-05-01 19:03:22+00:00
I'm fine with that definition.

"We're all pretty sure of that. Where did you dream up this straw man?" is just the kind of provocation that produces that kind of discussion, though.

One thing to keep in mind is that most of us underestimate the provocation in our own posts (let's say by 10x) and overestimate the provocation in others' posts (let's say by another 10x) and that leads to quite a skew in perception [1]. I believe this is why everyone always feels like the other person started it / did worse [2]. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear! [3]

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-01 19:03:31+00:00
Does that sound sustainable in a world of low or no growth with total fertility rates rapidly declining?

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman
by scalewithlee | 2025-05-01 19:03:38+00:00
Location: North Carolina (USA)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: python, kubernetes, docker, go, aws, gcp, terraform, bash, linux, airflow

Resume: https://scalewithlee.substack.com/about

Email: leetgaines@gmail.com

I have about 7 years of experience as a devops and cloud infrastructure engineer, most recently as a principal engineer at autodesk. Actively seeking a new role and can start now. I'm a US citizen.
by El_Mo | 2025-05-01 19:03:52+00:00
SEEKING WORK - Business Strategy Hacker | Onsite EU / UK | REMOTE WORLDWIDE

I can do pretty much anything in IT. What I love doing the most is using my 30+ years of technical experience to create responsive, efficient and long-lasting technology implementations for clients.

I can work as easily at the project level as I can at a global C-level.

I have 30+ years of experience in every area of IT, with hundreds of technologies, products, and technical paradigms. I'm a hands-on CTO, specialising in cloud, IT strategy, systems & DevOps engineering, enterprise development, solution / enterprise architecture, IT management, Big Data and data-based systems in general.

For more information please contact me directly via https://www.theconsultantcto.com/?sid=hnf2505 or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lajosm/.
by meatmanek | 2025-05-01 19:04:03+00:00
Airline accidents and deaths have steadily declined for 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...

Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... -- 40,990 deaths in 2023 vs. 54,052 deaths in 1973; 12.06 vs 25.51 per 100k population

Car fuel efficiency has ~doubled since 1975: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-...

Airline fuel efficiency has quadrupled since 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...

Corn yields per acre have doubled since 1975: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...

Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975.

Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990.

The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.
by an0malous | 2025-05-01 19:04:03+00:00
The previous startup waves were built on top of expanded Internet access, mobile phones, and virtualization. This allowed low capitalized startups to create 10x better software. What you’re describing is marginally better software, you’re not going to beat Gmail by making it 10s faster. No one really cares about dark patterns and spam.

There will eventually be new waves that create opportunities for startups again, LLMs are like that in some cases, but I’d argue that mobile phones were by far a larger disruptive innovation than LLMs so far.
by csdreamer7 | 2025-05-01 19:04:17+00:00
> So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users?

As far as I know; Valve has cut the rate for larger companies.

> Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...

I do not know what the point of this comment is. We were not discussing if a company is 'safer'. As one US judge said when an Indie game company sued Valve and lost; the 30% rate is common among digital platforms. The point myself and the above poster made was that Valve does a lot more then most platforms that do charge 30%. Myself as a Linux enthusiast is very thankful for Valve for their work on Proton and Mesa.
by Someone1234 | 2025-05-01 19:04:31+00:00
I agree; but then we need to come up with a different funding model.

Standards aren't free to publish and update, and currently the only revenue source is Pay-To-Access which most agree is problematic. The problem with government funded (e.g. funding the ones with legal enforcement), is that then we're picking winners and losers, and it may cause stagnation (or monopolies).

I don't like it. I also don't have a better idea.