MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanderjd | 2025-05-13 12:01:37+00:00
A few comments seem to make the assumption that "via computers" implies screens, but that assumption is not valid; computers can talk.

I agree with the thrust of the pushback though. I think it seems like there would need to at least be a human voice fallback, and then you'd want to exercise that pretty often, because having an emergency fallback that is never exercised is a recipe for disaster.
by xg15 | 2025-05-13 12:02:54+00:00
> Right now, a 4-year-old child can access any porn site and binge as they please, becoming addicted to dopamine. No, that’s not okay.

That's not completely wrong, unfortunately, but also: If you follow that logic, we have already raised several generations of (now adult) addicts, who would be required to instantly go "cold turkey" after a lifetime of addiction. Did the authors of that law envision any kind of treatment for them?
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-05-13 12:03:04+00:00
No one has a natural right to have their work protected by copyright. Copyright is supposed to be a deal to encourage creativity _and_ benefit the public domain.

Capitalists have distorted it to be a means to pay the producers (ie capital holders) over-and-over whilst eroding the public domain.

The default position is if you (a creator) make a work available anyone can copy it, alter it, resell it for free. I don't think that is right, but what we currently have is IMO not a sufficient benefit to the public.
by arp242 | 2025-05-13 12:03:25+00:00
"Boo hoo I need to start X11"? Seriously?

I have some unconventional workflows. And I try not to bother anyone else with it, especially in a volunteer driven open source context. It would be selfish to do otherwise.

To be honest based on what you've written here, keeping you out of my projects sounds like a good thing. What a bunch of piss and vinegar over how other people are choosing to work in a way that works for them.
by busterarm | 2025-05-13 12:04:46+00:00
Let's keep the CPU efficiency golf to Zachtronics games, please.

I/O is almost always the main bottleneck. I swear to god 99% of developers out there only know how to measure cpu cycles of their code so that's the only thing they optimize for. Call me after you've seen your jobs on your k8s clusters get slow because all of your jobs are inefficiently using local disk and wasting cycles waiting in queue for reads/writes. Or your DB replication slows down to the point that you have to choose between breaking the mirror and stop making money.

And older hardware consumes more power. That's the main driving factor between server hardware upgrades because you can fit more compute into your datacenter.

I agree with Carmack's assessment here, but most people reading are taking the wrong message away with them.
by titzer | 2025-05-13 12:05:00+00:00
I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X.

If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster.

If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice:

I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabilities, and you can debug your programs orders of magnitude more easily, or you can have a computer that runs 1000X faster and software will be just as buggy, or worse, and debugging will be even more of a nightmare.

People would have their minds blown at 950X. You wouldn't even have to offer 1000X. But guess what we chose...

Personally I think the 1000Xers kinda ruined things for the rest of us.
by krisoft | 2025-05-13 12:06:48+00:00
> You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.

Fascinating. It sounds like the miscommunication happens because there is two different ways "I don't think there's any debate that X" is used.

One is used to communicate a fact. The fact that X is so uncontroversial that nobody debates it.

The other one seems to be using "I don't think there's any debate" as a kind of emphasis. It's a bit like double underscoring X and writing three exclamation points around it. It doesn't change that you are still just saying X but with more élan.

And if different people use it differently then of course they won't understand each other. One would be confused that their strongly held opinion has been declared false without the conversation partner even addressing X. The other would be confused how something so easily disproven (by the presence of a debate) can be maintained.

But of course I can be wrong.
by jsheard | 2025-05-13 12:07:39+00:00
IBM PowerPC 750X apparently, which was the CPU the Power Mac G3 used back in the day. Since it's going into space it'll be one of the fancy radiation-hardened versions which probably still costs more than your car though, and they run four of them in lockstep to guard against errors.

https://www.eetimes.com/comparing-tech-used-for-apollo-artem...
by PostOnce | 2025-05-13 12:07:45+00:00
What did you try? It might be worth talking about here to try to gain some insight.

B2B products, unless miraculous, do not generally "take off" without a lot of hard work, meetings, trade shows, client demos, etc, at least so far as I have seen.

To make any sales at all, it seems like you'd have to already know a lot of people in the industry, and it would have to outcompete not only other products, but just the old "we'll load all the shit we can into the truck/container based on human intuition".

In fact, ideally, you'd ask someone you know (or even better, they'll ask you) if this is a problem you can solve for them. If you can't sell it to people you already know, it'll be even harder to sell to people you don't, presumably.

Plus it will be very hard to articulate to an AI "you can't sit that on top of that!", but it's obvious when looking at it.

I'm in the midst of wading into B2B, alone, and low on capital, myself. My "success" so far is mostly due to dumb luck and being available to talk to.
Show HN: Vision AI Checkup, an Optometrist for VLMs
by zerojames | 2025-05-13 12:08:02+00:00
Evaluating visual capabilities of language models is hard.

On the one end of the evaluation spectrum, we have vibe checks which, while useful for building intuition, are time-consuming to run across a dozen or more models. On the other end, we have large benchmarks which are so large that they are intractable to most users.

Vision AI Checkup is a new tool for evaluating VLMs. The site is made up of hand-crafted prompts focused on real-world problems: defect detection, understanding how the position of one object relates to another, colour understanding, and more.

Our prompts are especially focused on industrial tasks -- serial number reading, assembly line understanding, and more -- although we're excited to add more general prompts.

The tool lets you see how models do across categories of prompts, and how different models do on a single prompt.

We have open sourced the codebase, with instructions on how to add a prompt to the assessment: https://github.com/roboflow/vision-ai-checkup. You can also add new models.

We'd love feedback and, also, ideas for areas where VLMs struggle that you'd like to see assessed!
by dooglius | 2025-05-13 12:08:06+00:00
No, tmux uses unix domain sockets. I have no idea why screen chose to take the setuid approach instead here; it seems totally unnecessary to have root privileges.

EDIT: Further down, TFA gives a plausible explanation: the current screen devs are not fully familiar with the code base. If so, the setuid-root approach was probably the easiest way to make the feature work in lieu of such familiarity.
by SilverSlash | 2025-05-13 12:08:24+00:00
The title made me think Carmack was criticizing poorly optimized software and advocating for improving performance on old hardware.

When in fact, the tweet is absolutely not about either of the two. He's talking about a thought experiment where hardware stopped advancing and concludes with "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".
by Aman4312 | 2025-05-13 12:08:40+00:00
We just launched AI-Quant Studio, a tool that lets you describe a trading strategy in natural language and instantly backtest it — no code needed.

Example: “Buy when AAPL breaks above recent high and MACD > 0”

The system parses it, runs it on historical data, and shows results. Built for traders who have ideas but don’t want to code them up.

Would love feedback from the HN community — thoughts on the approach, UX, or where you'd take it next.
Show HN: I built a system to make ChatGPT brutally honest with you
by moobuilds | 2025-05-13 12:09:08+00:00
Most people use ChatGPT wrong.

Without the right guidance or prompting .

ChatGPT will validate anything you say.

It's designed to be agreeable, not truthful.

It will praise your bad ideas.

It will overlook critical flaws.

It will miss market opportunities.

And you'll never know until it's too late.

You need brutal honesty, not false validation.

It won't challenge your beliefs, question your

decisions, or call out your blind spots.

Unless you force it to.

So, That's why I built a system to fix that.

It's a set of prompts designed to override the

default behavior and turn ChatGPT into what you

actually need:

a brutally honest, advisor for Self-Growth .

Try this prompt (copy-paste it inside ChatGPT ):

---

I want you to act as my brutally honest, high-level advisor.

Speak to me like I’m a founder or leader with

massive potential but dangerous blind spots.

Don’t comfort me.

Don’t flatter me.

Give me the unfiltered truth—even if it stings.

Tell me what I’m doing wrong, what I’m avoiding,

and what I need to do to get to the next level.

No fluff.

No lies.

Just clarity.

-----

This is one of many.

If you’re serious about using ChatGPT to grow and

build, think, or grow—stop letting it lie to you.

Start getting real answers.

https://honestprompts.com
by rnd0 | 2025-05-13 12:09:17+00:00
>Let's not get sidetracked with the whole LGTBIQH or whatever topic

No -LET'S; because it's not a sidetrack; it's the primary motivation.

Quoth project 2025: "Pornography, manifested today in the *omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology* and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

This is saying that anyone performing education or support services on LGBTQ issues, specifically transgender issues "educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders."

Focusing on this issue is not a side-track; it's one of the primary motivators for this new bill -to target, harass and imprison those who are LGBTQ...

of course anyone with more than two working braincells can anticipate how it would be expanded upon (goodbye freedom of assembly, goodbye unionizing); but it's a foot in the door.
Show HN: I built a decentralized crypto exchange from scratch using Solidity
by KrishBaidya | 2025-05-13 12:10:06+00:00
I'm a solo dev experimenting with smart contracts and wanted to build a simplified version of Uniswap to understand how decentralized trading really works under the hood.

The DEX is live here: dex-web-krishbaidya.vercel.app GitHub: https://github.com/KrishBaidya/DEX

There are issues, and users might lose money right now - but I’m sharing it to get feedback, not to promote it as production-ready.

Happy to answer any technical questions around Solidity, liquidity pools, front-end integration, or things I screwed up during development.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-13 12:10:24+00:00
> caring about the cache is more helpful regaring performance then the casual programmer might think.

Cache is easily the most important consideration if you intend to go fast. The instructions are meaningless if they or their dependencies cannot physically reach the CPU in time.

The latency difference between L1/L2 and other layers of memory is quite abrupt. Keeping workloads in cache is often as simple as managing your own threads and tightly controlling when they yield to the operating system. Most languages provide some ability to align with this, even the high level ones.
by hbartab | 2025-05-13 12:12:00+00:00
If this were just about tech transfer, in which private firms commercialize public research, I agree. But that's not what Jason Pruet is saying. In the Q&A he notes:

> “Why don’t we just let private industry build these giant engines for progress and science, and we’ll all reap the benefits?” The problem is that if we’re not careful, it could lead us to a very different country than the one we’ve been in.

This isn't about commercialization, it's about control. When access to frontier models and SOTA compute is gated by private interests, academics (and the public) risk getting locked out. Not because of merit, but because their work doesn't align with corporate priorities.
by titzer | 2025-05-13 12:12:24+00:00
It's about 5%.

Cost of cyberattacks globally[1]: O($trillions)

Cost of average data breach[2][3]: ~$4 million

Cost of lost developer productivity: unknown

We're really bad at measuring the secondary effects of our short-sightedness.

[1] https://iotsecurityfoundation.org/time-to-fix-our-digital-fo...

[2] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2023/how-to-ta...

[3] https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach
by monegator | 2025-05-13 12:12:26+00:00
>Attempts to raise the issue with Google resulted in little more than copy-and-pasted sections of the developer guide

My exact same experience. We had two very simillar apps for a brief time, the old version that interfaces to the old hardware, for old phones, and the new version which was basically redesigned from scratch but kept the same UI. We wanted at least to have a fallback version in case users had any issue, for whatever reason.

From the top of my head, i can name at least a dozen apps that i use daily that have multiple versions of them on the store, for the same reason we did.

However, we received a complaint from google, which froze both our apps, because apparently you can't make one app that looks too simillar to another one.

First, it's our APP. We are not trying to copy anyone (the chief reason for this rule, you don't want fake malicious clones of apps) Second, it's only the first page that looks the same (a video was provided showing the differences once you connected to a companion device. Also ALL our apps have the same first page) Third, what about all the free/pro app pairs you can find? Not every developer chose to follow the in-app-purchase route for unlocking features.

For at least two weeks i kept receiving copypasted responses. All the same wording, all copypasting pieces of the guidelines which can be interpreted in many different ways. After two weeks, they either escalated to a human being, or to a less useless one and we started chatting. We could convince them to at least unlock one of the Apps while deciding what to do with the other one.

Re: second point, they were immovable. Re: third point, when i was asking why the other developer's apps are still there, and what could i do to make the same, the answer was invariably the same: "I can't comment for the other apps, but if you think they violate the guidelines you can report them", so the exact opposite of what i was asking. Which is proof enough to me: they don't stop anything unless reported, and we had a third party attack us with a swarm of fake reports on behalf of a competitor, which already happened in the past. Human beings - or at least with a functioning brain - are not working at google's developer support.

In the meantime we had to distribute the APK, which is not great the moment you need to update.

Apple gave zero fuss, we have had both versions on the store since day one.
by bobxmax | 2025-05-13 12:12:32+00:00
I'm sick of this forum's lame performative cynicism masquerading as depth—it's a lazy cop-out that spares you people from the uncomfortable, demanding work of actually building something better.

Technology that any of us 5 years ago would've thought was a hundred years away and all you read is moving goalposts from ornery developers in denial.

Silicon Valley is cooked.
by phire | 2025-05-13 12:12:41+00:00
It's hard to find dates for that type of thing (especially with sourceforge, their website seems actively mess with the wayback machine). But I dug deeper, apparently Sourceforge got support for SVN in 2006, which is a few months before google code.

2006 appears to be the year that SVN finally became somewhat mainstream, which is interesting because git was released in 2005. Github launched in 2008 and by 2009, everyone seemed to be abandoning SVN.

It feels like SVN was only really "mainstream" for about 3 years, Maybe 5 years at most; There was some early-adopter lead-up and then a long tail of repos refusing to switch to git.
by abhisek | 2025-05-13 12:12:55+00:00
Not sure if it’s relevant because you specifically mentioned about B2C.

For cyber security product, we took the open source route. We build our core technology in public as open source project.

https://github.com/safedep/vet

The commercial SaaS is for scaling and management. Our entire funnel is based on OSS. Folks who have already found value and is looking to scale their deployment.

This model works for us especially at our current stage where we are 100% engineering led.
Show HN: Turn voice notes into structured to-do lists
by Jorrell | 2025-05-13 12:13:09+00:00
I had this crazy idea a couple months ago. What if you could just talk, and the computer would turn it into an actual to-do list?

So I built it. It basically does the following:

- Transcribes audio - Lets you edit the transcription - Extracts actionable to do list items and turns them into checkboxes

It's still a bit rough, but functional. Great for meetings, client calls, or just dumping thoughts into a mic. I've been able to just vent random ideas and things I need to do and it has been able to just give me a concise list for the most part.

I'd love feedback though, especially on the UX and extraction quality.
by dns_snek | 2025-05-13 12:13:32+00:00
> I dunno isn't this why Android users root their phones?

No, because it would be like using dynamite to drill a small hole in the wall - effectively destroying the platform's entire security model as well as locking yourself out of vital apps (finance/banking), and many non-vital apps that pretend they need the same level of security and refuse to work on rooted devices.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-13 12:14:08+00:00
>A community project's aim is loosey-goosey. The mission, values, governance, ownership/control, etc can change. While there is input from the community, they are often led by one or two dominant personalities.

Project direction can change in any case. Even against user's wishes.

The difference: in a community-led project, it's usually >1 person at the helm. And those leaders can put themselves at risk of being replaced by their community. Which at least puts a cap on how much they can push through their own decisions.

A benevolent dictator doesn't have this problem. And therefore can move easier.

But it's a fine line, and very easy to run foul of the "benevolent" part @ some point. Few DFLs manage this long-term.

Not to mention that over time, a community's desired project direction may simple diverge from project leader's vision. Pet project with a handful like-minded contributors != big project with many users & contributors.
by JdeBP | 2025-05-13 12:14:13+00:00
screen has a lot of architectural baggage that can be traced back to its initial 1987 comp.sources.unix/mod.sources versions in some cases. Being set-UID to the superuser is one of them. See the doco for screen as it was posted in volume 10:

https://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume10/screen/
by xyzzy123 | 2025-05-13 12:14:20+00:00
It doesn't seem like stealing to me? Highly optimised software generally takes more effort to create and maintain.

The tradeoff is that we get more software in general, and more features in that software, i.e. software developers are more productive.

I guess on some level we can feel that it's morally bad that adding more servers or using more memory on the client is cheaper than spending developer time but I'm not sure how you could shift that equilibrium without taking away people's freedom to choose how to build software?
by os2warpman | 2025-05-13 12:14:37+00:00
It used to be there was one hardware store in town and you bought what they carried, and they would carry tools of a sufficient quality to avoid returns and complaints.

Now you can buy tools from several thousand different manufacturers and people trend towards the less expensive options.

You can also, with just a little research, buy the best in the world from anywhere in the world. (edit: for now)

I built sets for a small regional theater company back in the 90s and we had, at the time, state-of-the-art cordless Makita power tools. Today's Makitas are so much better it is ludicrous. The old skinny-handled Makitas were barely powerful enough to do the job, the batteries didn't last long and had memory issues, the chucks were clunky, brushes would wear out extremely quickly, and the plastic was so brittle if you dropped them the housing would often crack or split.

I remember having to pre-drill thousands of pilot holes for screws and bolts, not because I was worried about the wood splitting but because the drills weren't powerful enough for longer and/or thicker screws.

Modern Makitas are more robust, more powerful, smaller and lighter, and more reliable.

They can drive 3/4" hex head lag bolts into soaking wet wood all day, something that was impossible for (or destructive to) 80s and 90s tools.

In the 80s and 90s I had the same Craftsman screwdriver set that everyone else in America had-- the ones with the clear handles that turned into a cylinder of greased ice the second a single drop of oil got on them.

Now I have a nice set of Weras and even when wearing oil-soaked gloves they are easy to grip.
by threetonesun | 2025-05-13 12:14:48+00:00
Obviously, the world ran before computers. The more interesting part of this is what would we lose if we knew there were no new computers, and while I'd like to believe the world would put its resources towards critical infrastructure and global logistics, we'd probably see the financial sector trying to buy out whatever they could, followed by any data center / cloud computing company trying to lock all of the best compute power in their own buildings.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-13 12:14:58+00:00
> No one talks that dispach-able power is often coal or oil.

... Because they're generally not, nearly anywhere. Oil power plants are, in general, rare today nearly everywhere in the world; natural gas really did a number on them. And dispatchable power plants are almost _never_ coal; the startup lead-time is too high (hours at least). Ignoring weird stuff like grid batteries and pumped storage plants, they're nearly always gas turbines.
by wtetzner | 2025-05-13 12:15:45+00:00
> I/O is almost always the main bottleneck.

People say this all the time, and usually it's just an excuse not to optimize anything.

First, I/O can be optimized. It's very likely that most servers are either wasteful in the number of requests they make, or are shuffling more data around than necessary.

Beyond that though, adding slow logic on top of I/O latency only makes things worse.

Also, what does I/O being a bottleneck have to do with my browser consuming all of my RAM and using 120% of my CPU? Most people who say "I/O is the bottleneck" as a reason to not optimize only care about servers, and ignore the end users.