MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chao- | 2025-05-12 14:48:49+00:00
I agree and I am overall mixed on this.

One of the tradeoffs that (imo) has been net positive in the Ruby ecosystem, is how a project has to ultimately load and run a single set of versions of all dependencies. It creates some extra maintenance work on one hand, but the result is that it encourages the ecosystem to not have to face the hell of having 3 or 5 or 10 versions of each common dependency within a project.

I recognize that this is an occasional cost to library maintainers, but in the long-term has contributed to benefits. My perception is that Ruby libraries have smaller list of dependencies than similar libraries in some other languages. There are several reasons for this, but this ecosystem pressure to stay compatible with a range of dependency versions is one of them.

It feels to me like this leads to a sweet spot for small- and medium-sized projects, and I can see it might have an upper limit? I have not been in the situation, but heard of situations where the largest projects inevitably run into needing specific versions of two separate libraries that don't agree on a version of a common dependency.
by rileytg | 2025-05-12 14:48:54+00:00
Ruby on Rails is still very much alive and well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130546

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881035

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42253735

and more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
by ajb | 2025-05-12 14:48:56+00:00
It's basically the same in the x86 world : your bios is customised to the board

The sad part is that on ARM the kernel is usually also custom compiled for the board. So what happens is that Armbian ship a different image for each board.

If you go and look in https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm you see a zillion "mach-xxx" directories for different SoC architectures, even if they all use Arm.

Device-tree is a partial solution, but no-one seems to have an incentive to finish the job and let a single image run on any (sufficiently recent) arm board. It's difficult for the community to fix because most people have only their own board. Someone would need to pay for a CI rig with every board, and some kernel devs to do the work of building a single kernel to run across everything. (I think that's originally what Linaro was for - not sure why they didn't finish the job)
by mvid | 2025-05-12 14:49:10+00:00
It might be hard to believe, but on the inside, people like this are pretty easy to spot. Crypto people are weirdly bad at scamming, compared to other con artists, but because the amount of damage is so fast and liquidity so easy, incompetent people can do a lot of damage.

The scammers also the most vocal. Partially because they aren’t building something novel or valuable, and make up for it in marketing and flash. It’s also faster to build a con than to build a real product, so you see more of them

But yes. It is exhausting. Honest parties in the industry need to build against a large and growing negative reputation. It may be insurmountable. And the industry, generally, does nothing to punish these bad parties or self-regulate. The industry likely has to die, and be reborn after the token/blockchain era
by n_ary | 2025-05-12 14:49:36+00:00
Robber barrons rob people.

The issue with gig economy is that, the provider side is either doing it for some extra cash for as a short stint is fine, but people relying on it for survival do not want to shake the boat as they are desperate and have bills to pay and food to put on the table.

Consultants and contractors charge a fixed rate dictated by the work and contract. Gig economy pushes all liabilities on the consultants minus paying for that privilege. The bargaining power is heavily skewed in favor of then platform, hence nothing will change.
by realo | 2025-05-12 14:49:45+00:00
I am a human. i can listen to music, look at videos, movies, read books etc etc...

If I were a musician, I could pull upon my life's experience of music to create new, unheard before, music in any style I chose.

My music would belong to me because I created it.

How is it different for an "innocent" AI who does exactly the same thing?
by afavour | 2025-05-12 14:49:54+00:00
I'd say Ruby is more relevant than Elixir. But you're correct (IMO) that Ruby had a big moment but has died down since. At one point it almost felt like the default choice in startup land. Not so today.

Ruby on Rails specifically has a batteries included approach that lets you get up and running very quickly. But my perception is that as JavaScript has leaked into the server (benefits of writing the same language on front and back end) it's eaten into Ruby's mindshare. Python also finally moved on from its 2 vs 3 nightmare and shares many of the benefits of Ruby.
by grquantum | 2025-05-12 14:49:58+00:00
I think this commits the same sin many other new HDLs do -- it just tries to awkwardly smush the paradigm of clocked logic into a sequential software language. The abstractions just don't match, which means you lose the mental connection between the code and the generated Verilog, which makes debugging stuff like timing awkward.

I'm a big Bluespec booster, and beyond the nice typing and functional programming you get I think the big advance it brings to the table is the Guarded Atomic Action paradigm, which simplifies reasoning about what the code is doing and means that it's usually not too painful to poke at the generated HDL too since there's a clear connection between the two halves. At $WORK$ we've been using Bluespec very successfully in a small team to quickly iterate on hardware designs.

I don't want to denigrate the Spade developers since it's clearly a labor of love and nicely done, but I feel that unless the underlying mental model changes there's not much benefit to any of these neo-HDLs compared to SV or VHDL.
by kartoffelsaft | 2025-05-12 14:49:59+00:00
This seems written to sound like a profound piece of wisdom, but I find it difficult to not interperet it as a very flowery way of saying "git gud." If that is indeed what you mean then that is fine, but it is still worth acknowledging that the greater competition for funding of today means scientists of today are not playing the same game as scientists of Bell Labs's time.
by coolsuds420 | 2025-05-12 14:50:03+00:00
There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately.

Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.
by pbmonster | 2025-05-12 14:50:19+00:00
> Would be nice if it were easy to share (offline) map data between apps. Download in app A, backup on sd card , use from app B, C, D, or on other device by swap/copy sd card. Maybe it's possible, but I haven't figured out how (on Android).

I'm also really hoping for that. Some kind of local OSM map server that all apps in the ecosystem call to provide geodata.

I run OSMand, StreetComplete, Organic Maps and Magic Earth on my phone. I need all of them to download the exact same geo data. And for convenience reasons, I usually load entire countries. It's so annoying having to download a country in app #3...
by mpweiher | 2025-05-12 14:50:34+00:00
Good point!

I haven't really been paying attention to the GUI or dev-tools side of GNUstep, it was just duplicating what I have on macOS and I was more interested in server applications on other platforms.

An obvious mistake, in retrospect.

With Apple destroying both the UI and the development tools, the situation has fundamentally changed and that assessment is no longer valid.

I need to take a closer look!
by lordfrito | 2025-05-12 14:50:34+00:00
No one wants to acknowledge that the economics will likely never work out for the reasons you mentioned. Too much maintenance -- and very expensive maintenance at that. It's far cheaper cost per watt to build a traditional fission reactor and run/maintain that.

Another reason is that ̶t̶r̶a̶n̶s̶m̶i̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ distribution costs are half of your energy bill... so even if you could theoretically get fusion energy generation for "free" (which is impossible) you've still only cut your power bill in half.

Edit: I meant to say distribution costs not transmission. Looking at last months bill I paid $66.60 to deliver $51.76 of energy (about 56% of my total bill was delivery). The raw distribution charge was $49.32 or 42% of the bill. I'm not alone in these numbers, but your mileage may vary.
by eWeSaYYY | 2025-05-12 14:50:45+00:00
Copyright is pirating our attention to boost a minority of creatives who have immense resource and political influence at the expense of the rest of us.

Life of author + 100 years is beyond the life of many. While the Constitution provides copyright for a limited time. The rest of any givens persons life is effectively “infinite amount of time”.

It’s just another Boomer Ponzi scheme, extracting as much as possible, trickling down as little as possible.

Americans have disassociated from reality into a world of propaganda narratives of corporations. This is just sad how little pushback there is to these obviously exploitative economic schemes that conveniently allow all the elders to funnel all wealth into their hands and control society’s agency.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 14:51:47+00:00
Imagine a world where all models capable of creating a new Mario game from scratch are only available through cloud providers which must implement mandatory filters such that asking "write me a Mario clone" (or anything functionally equivalent) gets you a lecture on don't-copy-that-floppy.

Bad PR? The entire copyright enforcement industry has had bad PR pretty much since easy copying enabled grassroots piracy - i.e. since before computers even. It never stopped them. What are you going to do about it? Vote? But all the mainstream parties are onboard with the copyright lobby.
by mellosouls | 2025-05-12 14:51:55+00:00
In just 5 billion years? This surprises me, trillion I could understand, 5 billion is similar to the age of the earth.

Incidentally, the obvious counter to "our time is special, we have access to everything" is presumably what future civilisations think as well; the implication being perhaps we have lost something over the aeons that would shed light on our current mysteries.

I haven't read the book but it's an unconvincing extract, though I acknowledge a larger context may justify it.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-05-12 14:52:20+00:00
The issue with that is that inheritance only makes sense for tangible, scarce resources. Having copyright isn't easily analogous to ownership of a physical object, because an object is something you have and if somebody else has it, you can not have and use it.

Copyright is about control. If you know a song and you sing it to yourself, somebody overhears it and starts humming it, they have not deprived you of the ability to still know and sing that song. You can make economic arguments, of deprived profit and financial incentives, and that's fine; I'm not arguing against copyright here (I am not a fan of copyright, it's just not my point at the moment), I'm just saying that inheritance does not naturally apply to copyright, because data and ideas are not scarce, finite goods. They are goods that feasibly everybody in the world can inherit rapidly without lessening the amount that any individual person gets.

If real goods could be freely and easily copied the way data can, we might be having some very interesting debates about the logic and morality of inheriting your parents' house and depriving other people of having a copy.
by GTCHO | 2025-05-12 14:53:18+00:00
I hear you and to be clear, this isn’t about replacing talented QA teams. It’s about offloading the repetitive and pattern-based parts of QA so human testers can focus on more strategic, exploratory, and usability-driven work.

In the case I saw, the agent handled things like regression patterns, diff analysis, and known-risk detection across thousands of past issues. The QA team actually became more valuable because they weren’t stuck rerunning the same test plan for the fifth time that week. It was augmentation, not replacement.

That said, I totally agree if a team is just rubber-stamping PRs, the issue isn’t automation, it’s expectations and leadership.
by Mashimo | 2025-05-12 14:53:29+00:00
Might be art, might be fun. But you also claimed it's easy to update.

But now you have to write <font size="5" face="Helvetica"> every time you create another one of those elements.

And if you want to change the font you would need to search and replace in different .html files.

It does not seem easy to update.
by drabbiticus | 2025-05-12 14:53:34+00:00
Code is a way you treat your coworkers - Michael Feather, https://x.com/mfeathers/status/1031176879577780224

TL;DR, not AI

The code defers a function call until the point in time that an object goes out of scope. The implementation uses C macros to create a more succinct syntax that omits parts of the necessary C lambda/unnamed function definition and to create a unique variable name for managing the deferred function call. However, the resulting syntax eschews the common convention of using UPPER CASE to denote C macros, and instead appears similar at first glance to a function call from an object pointer.

This can cause confusion if one is not familiar with this pattern and expects macros to be communicated differently. Some commenters say this is common enough, or useful enough to them, to be considered almost idiomatic in some contexts.

For technical explanation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959403#43960905 provides a useful breakdown of how the macro works.
by glenstein | 2025-05-12 14:53:40+00:00
Right so we're limited in time and resources, in a sense. Only some of the universe would be reachable within those 10^1100 or 10^78 years anyway. So we are limited by time but also what we can access.

What's fascinating to me is to consider the frontier of galaxies theoretically reachable within a given window, and the potential race to colonize them before they race away.
Show HN: Search to Play – Discover and track video games (like Letterboxd)
by guar47 | 2025-05-12 14:53:48+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m the solo developer of Search to Play, a social bookmarking platform for gamers — kind of like Letterboxd or Goodreads, but for video games.

You can log your games, track your backlog, write reviews, and follow others. I’m building this as an alternative to spreadsheet tracking or platform-locked tools (Steam, PSN, etc). Would love your feedback! Happy to answer any questions here.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-12 14:53:54+00:00
I have yet to see someone explain in detail how transformer model training works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of transformers) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright.

You can find lots of people talking about training, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about AI training being a violation of copyright, but you can't find anyone talking about both.

Edit: Let me just clarify that I am talking about training, not inference (output).
by palmotea | 2025-05-12 14:54:10+00:00
> If you just have property rights and no human rights, and have everything dictated by the ability to satisfy a market participant's desire to wealth, you're going to have a lot of horrible things justified by that desire to create wealth.

I don't see how you'd have a "lot of horrible things." Doesn't the market system optimize for the maximum good, so if the market system produces a thing, isn't that thing good by definition?
by pixl97 | 2025-05-12 14:54:17+00:00
Someone made a miscalculation with 5 billion years, but with that said, it's only just over an order of magnitude more which isn't much

>And what are presently the closest galaxy groups outside of the Local Group — objects like the M81 group — will be the last to become unreachable: something that won't occur until more than 110 billion years from now, when the Universe is nearly ten times its present age.
by coolsuds420 | 2025-05-12 14:54:49+00:00
Every genius I met in tech had a story about how they couldn’t get any funding or time to research their own ideas, but had to follow the instructions of some cabal of geezers who control funding in their field.

If you want to look up the age discrimination or age distribution of scientific grants in America. You’ll clearly see that the funding apparatus doesn’t serve early career scientists as well as it did. Accordingly, the government is less valuable and people are correctly perceiving that resources could be better allocated.
by uallo | 2025-05-12 14:55:10+00:00
<meta name="viewport" content="width=800, initial-scale=0">

This sets the width to a mininum of 800px, no matter what phone model or browser you use. I'm a little confused how you can can claim this "Works well on any device" when apparently it was not tested on a phone. I, too, closed the tab before I even had a chance to learn about your product.

Update: Not OP, but I'm on a Pixel 8a with Firefox.
by JohnBooty | 2025-05-12 14:55:18+00:00
In the micro, this is definitely a useful crutch for using badly-written/badly-behaved code.

(In the example, it usefully provides a way to maintain sanity when `app1.rb` and `app2.rb` both define a global constant named `PORT`)

However, I'm not sure how much existing code is defining stuff in such a poorly considered way. (I don't mean that rhetorically. Maybe it's more pervasive than I think)

Furthermore, would adding this feature to the language actually encourage such bad behavior? (Would it even be "bad" behavior at that point?)

So I'm kind of leaning toward "I can see how this would be useful, but I don't want the language to condone such a bad practice."
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-05-12 14:55:19+00:00
> I’m happy to do whatever makes the most sense in any given situation

What makes the most sense in this situation: you walk to the nearest pizza place, you buy your pizza, done.

To an able-bodied person it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

Bonus points: you know the way back to your home.

> because problem-solving is work

You know who made someone else's problem a problem=solving problem? You.

The delivery guy will eventually find your place or he's just taking a different route for whatever reason.

How arrogant is it to think that you can tell people how to do their job, from your couch?

You obsession for micro managing other people's actions it only says that you suffer from high anxiety, it is not in any way proof that you make everyone better off. That's just what you tell yourself.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-12 14:55:27+00:00
The concern seems to be they want a bunch of guarantees about what will be done with the project - not because there is a change happening from Organic, but because they're afraid of a change happening in the future. If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then. I mean, hell, this already happened; they had Maps.ME, it was sold, Roman forked it to Organic. If it gets sold again they can fork again. This seems like it'll hurt the community more than if they'd waited until it was necessary.
by ffsm8 | 2025-05-12 14:55:47+00:00
Oh? All things considered, I believe html and css are both great. Incredibly flexible and very easy to get a basic "framework" started for consistent design

Everything else I've used to date (for UIs) was either extremely limited or way more complicated to use in comparison

I personally feel like the only thing we're missing is a way more aggressive deprecation policy. Not actually removing the API, just clearly signal that you would probably be better off not using it in 2025.
by freedomben | 2025-05-12 14:56:15+00:00
I did Ruby on rails professionally for many years, and have also done elix Phoenix professionally for many years now, and I would advise you to continue with Phoenix. Getting really good at elixir and Phoenix can make you an extremely powerful and employable developer. Should you find yourself in a situation where you need to switch to Ruby and rails, you will have a huge leg up because rails follow as many of the same patterns as Phoenix, and the Ruby language is very simple to learn for someone coming from elixir. Just my two cents of course
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-12 14:57:20+00:00
We're at a point where even "free hot water" is not competitive with solar for power generation. It costs more to build a 1GW coal power plant than it does to build a 3GW solar power plant (the 3X is capacity factor compensation). And most of the cost of that coal power plant is the steam turbine and its infrastructure.

We're not at that point yet with natural gas because a combined cycle turbine is more efficient than a steam turbine.
by margalabargala | 2025-05-12 14:57:48+00:00
> But there is a large population--the unbanked--that lacks access to credit cards. For that population, the choice is not between credit card and BNPL, but BNPL and cash.

Which is an indication that the status quo will not last.

The median person who cannot get a bank account and a credit card, is in that state due to a history of either fraud or nonpayment.

Sooner or later, that preponderance of risk will catch up to BNPL and it will either become less accessible, like credit cards, or it will become more like services that already service that population segment, like check cashing locations and payday loans.

Them having better technology and granularity like you say won't save them. At best it can delay the inevitable.
by daxfohl | 2025-05-12 14:57:58+00:00
Or it could make abstractions even more important and useful. If it's able to identify common but nuanced patterns across the entirety of github, it could build libraries and frameworks that satisfy them. Then it would fine tune itself based on those tools, and start using those abstractions going forward.

That would improve the consistency and reduce the complexity of software everywhere in a way that gaggles of human engineers across thousands of computers never could.

It would be beneficial for the AI too, as the fewer things it has to keep track of, the more efficiently and accurately it will be able to generate correct applications on top of it. This would cut costs, hallucinations, and allow smaller local models to perform better.
by autobodie | 2025-05-12 14:57:58+00:00
I have yet to see someone explain in detail how writing the same words as another person works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of the human mind) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about reading, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about plagarism being a violation of copyright, but you can't find anyone talking about both.
Show HN: Eurker – A Developer-First Uptime Monitoring Platform with JSON Configs
by ajoshu | 2025-05-12 14:58:07+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an uptime monitoring tool similar to other services, but more lightweight, easier to set up, and focused on developer flexibility. It includes all the essential features — keyword assertions, custom HTTP methods, retries, alerts via SMS/Email/Slack/Webhooks — with a clean JSON config system for advanced setups.

I originally made it last month to learn more about Firebase Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, and to build something real for my portfolio. It turned out to be genuinely useful, so I’ve decided to share it.

Would love your feedback – especially from devs who monitor lots of APIs or services.

Live: https://eurker.com

Thanks!