MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 20:03:37+00:00
I took great pains to support Firefox, mostly in my service worker.

Unfortunately when it comes to mounting drives for faster local development, there's nothing I can do until FF supports `showDirectoryPicker`

However, you could just load up a local file server in your local directory (python -m http.server 8080) and import your file directly:

import 'http://localhost:8080/index.js'

Then put that one line of code inside usr/myapp.app.js and click it in filer[1]

You'll have to use filer to create the file and edit it by right-clicking, then type it in and ctrl-s to save or use the top-left menu button.

I'll add all of this to the website under some "Using Firefox" page or something, for people who can't stand Chrome.

[1] https://90s.dev/os/#sys/apps/filer.app.js@usr/
Ask HN: Help me find a conference talk on hiring/debugging mindset
by rbjorklin | 2025-05-20 20:04:24+00:00
At some point in the last 2 years I came across a conference talk, possibly on Youtube, where the speaker talked about hiring for mindsets rather than skills. If I recall correctly the speaker had some relatively well formulated questions for how to identify a person with a good debugging/troubleshooting mindset. I only vaguely remember the talk at this point so you'll have to excuse the fuzzy description.
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-20 20:04:47+00:00
Lots of variables, but I voted "~30".

In general, every day. I hate feeling dirty and am self-conscious about odor in general.

More realistically, every other day in winter. Winter is cool and dry, so I don't really sweat much. If I'm sitting at home and not doing much physical, it might stretch to three days; any more than that and I feel dirty even if I'm actually not.

In the summer, daily is more of a minimum. I live two hours ahead of most of my colleagues, so my day is often split: I'll get up early and do yard work, bathe, then work for the day. If I have to go out for an event or something in the evening, I'll often bathe again if I've gone outside even once. You sweat almost the instant you hit the outside air here.
by bluGill | 2025-05-20 20:05:13+00:00
Trains can run fully automated today, and if you are running into capacity issues they should be. You may still need more personnel, but it is a different type of personnel and full automation gives enough other advantages as to be worth it.

If the size of your blocks are an issue, then that is a problem worth solving. If you are can't fit in all those trains, then you need to build more track not try to compromise. Yes track is expensive, but if you can't fit all the trains then the passenger volume is high enough to support it. This likely requires better operations though and some people see a loss of their direct train and don't see how a fast (fast is critical!) transfer is overall better for them.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 20:05:41+00:00
Man I wish I was as good at pixel art as those people apparently are!

That's part of why I made my app into a platform where you can build apps but also share apps, libraries, and game assets. I can't make a game all on my own! I'm hoping people make and share spritesheets with this, after someone makes a spritemaker app of course. I'll keep working on my basic one.
by rglover | 2025-05-20 20:05:49+00:00
It's less likely (and really, depends on the quality of the team and their attention to detail—it's not a "law"), but certainly not a "no way." I'm far more concerned when the official answer to a feature missing is "just use a third-party!" That spoils a lot of tools for me as I immediately read that as "you're on your own, buddy, have fun with your Frankenstein app!"

Over time, unless the team building the thing is entirely tone deaf, I'd expect each individual tool to improve as demanded/necessary. Not only that, but knowing that those tools are being thought about as parts of a whole is deeply comforting (I trust them more than standalone tools as interdependency headaches have likely been solved).

One of the biggest headaches in JS is the tendency for tool builders to just eschew responsibility in favor of sending their community on a goose chase. I commend the Deno folks for taking this approach. We should have more, not less of this attitude in the ecosystem.
by iFire | 2025-05-20 20:06:10+00:00
You can also see my workflow for patching godot engine so it's mergable on a rebased master or stable release.

> This project uses git-assembler to simplify merging patches on top of the latest stable release by allowing each patch to be in a separate branch, so they can all be merged into a fresh branch without complicating the revision history.

https://github.com/KeyboardDanni/godot-for-sidescrollers

I'm https://github.com/fire
by mzs | 2025-05-20 20:06:43+00:00
You can read the list in the submitted image. Because it's subsriber only I was going to add that link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44045215 but after I submitted it there was oddly no discuss link - more discussion threads:

https://bsky.app/profile/joshuajfriedman.com/post/3lpm5odirq...

https://bsky.app/profile/jmcunning.bsky.social/post/3lpmpxtg...
by lupusreal | 2025-05-20 20:07:21+00:00
It sucks because it means users can't buy books from Kobo on the app unless they give Google their payment info. I don't want Google to have my payment info, least of all so I can buy something from a completely different company.

If Google insisted on being an option in the app it would be relatively fine. Users who prefer Googles payment system could chose it, but Google doesn't want users to have that choice.
by charles_f | 2025-05-20 20:08:28+00:00
This is the kind of pricing that I expect most AI companies are gonna try to push for, and it might get even more expensive with time. When you see the delta between what's currently being burnt by OpenAI and what they bring home, the sweet point is going to be hard to find.

Whether you find that you get $250 worth out of that subscription is going to be the big question
by pc86 | 2025-05-20 20:08:43+00:00
As a consumer it seems to me the low hanging fruit for these super-premium offerings is some substantial amount of API credits included every month. Back when API credits were a relatively new thing I used LLMs infrequently enough I just paid $5-10/mo for API credits and used a desktop UI to talk to ChatGPT.

Now they want $200, $250/mo which is borderline offensive, and you have to pay for any API use on top of that?
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-20 20:08:55+00:00
As someone who grew up very poor and first got access to email via Juno's free ad based email client.

I've seen so many people over the years just absolutely shit on ad based models.

But ad based models are probably the least regressive approach to commercial offerings that we've seen work in the wild.

I love ads. If you are smart you don't have to see them. If you are poor and smart you get free services without ads so you don't fall behind.

I notice that there are no free open source providers of LLM services at this point, it's almost as if services that have high compute costs have to be paid for SOME HOW.

Hopefully we get a Juno for LLM soon so that whole cycle can start again.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-20 20:09:32+00:00
Plenty of non-creative work can be automated.

Have a look at the workflow and agent design patterns in this video by youtuber Nate Herk when he talks about planning the architecture:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9yzBp14EM

There’s less talk about automating non-creative work because it’s not flashy. But I can promise it’s a ton of fun, and you can co-design these automations with an LLM.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-05-20 20:09:38+00:00
That is the essence of a grift, since the goal will never be achieved. It isn't even defined. Any small demographic imbalance will be reinterpreted as being a result of discrimination.

Also DEI proponents are usually extremely intolerant of any dissent, this has become a very clear pattern. It actively decreases the amount of perspectives on a problem.
Ask HN: AI data classification – Bigger headache than protecting it?
by cloakmaster | 2025-05-20 20:09:46+00:00
Hey HN, We're all rushing to use AI/LLMs with internal data. But before protecting it (masking, etc.), how are you figuring out what's actually sensitive (PII, IP) for AI use?

1. Current approach to classifying this data for AI? (Manual, scripts, tools?) 2. Biggest pain points/time sinks in that classification step? 3-Is this classification challenge largely solved, or still a manual mess for most? 4-Magic wand: What would your ideal 'AI data classifier' do? Curious about your real-world trenches, not generic AI risk talk. What works/doesn't? Cheers!
by raxxorraxor | 2025-05-20 20:09:59+00:00
That is the essence of a grift, since the goal will never be achieved. It isn't even defined. Any small demographic imbalance will be reinterpreted as being a result of discrimination.

Also DEI proponents are usually extremely intolerant of any dissent, this has become a very clear pattern. It actively decreases the amount of perspectives on a problem and as it is today, it is a net negative.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-20 20:10:35+00:00
> Wood is also clean and easy to dispose of, whereas modern materials provide a real headache and hazard.

Well there is a difference between painted & non-painted wood, as far as eco-impact of their disposal goes. Not to mention various anti-rot treatments like used for fencing poles & the like.

But in general you're correct.

> And IMO nothing compares to wood from an aesthetic perspective, which is important for living spaces.

No argument there. Eg. my sister has a kitchen table that's like a 5..6cm thick massive wooden slab. It has a very different quality, look & feel compared to most of today's "fast-fashion" furniture done in cheap, veneered particle board. One way or the other that table will easily outlast her.

Also: unless you live in a damp environment, wood indoors basically lasts forever. True, for window frames etc there exist more durable options today. But it's mostly a matter of cost, maintenance & aesthetics.
by kube-system | 2025-05-20 20:10:55+00:00
In professional and enthusiast circles, yes, but I think you underestimate the popularity of cheap laptops.

e.g. currently only 2 of the top 10 selling laptops on Amazon have >=300GB storage.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-La...

Cheap laptops with a Celeron, 4 GB RAM, and 64 GB storage have been incredibly popular since that formula became popular a handful of years ago. As are base-model MacBook Airs.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-20 20:11:14+00:00
> The main problem nowadays though is the US - they won't let you in without a Visa if you've been to places like Iraq or Libya since 2011. A colleague went to Syria a couple of months ago, I asked "are you happy you'll never be eligible for an esta again". It's fine for now as work will pay for a US visa, but in 20 years time when he's retired?

That's a fair bit of hypocrisy considering how many of their own soldiers they sent to Iraq.

I don't think I'll ever visit the US again though. So I wouldn't care about an ESTA. It's turning into a conservative religious place. I avoid those, like all of the middle east.

I'm trying to get an X in my passport so the US will simply deny me entrance. That way I can just say no to work if they want to send me there for a meeting or a tradeshow. I'm kinda genderqueer anyway (though not full non-binary) so that would be a good match. And if the US ever gets a sane government again I'm sure they will reverse this stuff right back.

Unfortunately my own government is also turning radical right conservative so they are making this harder :(
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-20 20:11:30+00:00
I mean, I get what everyone's saying. But, just Devil's Advocate, what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work?

We've used our software development skills to automate other people out of work for what can be argued to be literally decades. Each time we did it, we certainly expected that the people affected would find other work. New jobs were created. The world didn't end. I honestly don't think it would be that much worse this time.
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-20 20:11:46+00:00
I've toyed with Gemini 2.5 briefly and was impressed... but I just can't bring myself to see Google as an option as an inference provider. I don't trust them.

Actually, that's not true. I do trust them - I trust them to collect as much data as possible and to exploit those data to the greatest extent they can.

I'm deep enough into AI that what I really want is a personal RAG service that exposes itself to an arbitrary model at runtime. I'd prefer to run inference locally, but that's not yet practical for what I want it to do, so I use privacy-oriented services like Venice.ai where I can. When there's no other reasonable alternative I'll use Anthropic or OpenAI.

I don't trust any of the big providers, but I'm realizing that I have baseline hostility toward Google in 2025.
by noosphr | 2025-05-20 20:12:07+00:00
>How does Google have the best models according to benchmarks but it can't do anything useful with them?

KPI driven development with no interest in killing their cash cow.

These are the people who sat on transformers for 5 years because they were too afraid it would eat their core business, e.g. Bert.

One need look at what Bell Labs did to magnetic storage to realize that a monopoly isn't good for research. In short: we could have had mass magnetic storage in the 1920s/30s instead of 50s/60s.

A pop sci article about it: https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye...
by troupo | 2025-05-20 20:12:10+00:00
"I", "I don't know"

vs.

--- start quote ---

How much data have we collected?

- About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)

- Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080324235838/http://blogs.msdn...

--- end quote ---

I wish there were more recent studies on this, but they would paint the same picture
by heisenzombie | 2025-05-20 20:12:21+00:00
I have been thinking about this for months now! Very excited to see you've implemented it, and I'm excited to try this out.

Could be fantastic for my use-case. We have a large repo of notebooks that are generally write-once, sometimes-re-run. Having a separate repo/venv/kernel per notebook would be a big overhead, so I currently just try to do a kind of semantic versioning where I make a new kernel on something like a 6-month cadence and try to keep breaking dependency changes to a minimum in that window. I can then keep around the old kernels for running old notebooks that depend on them. This is not at all an ideal state.

Thanks for sharing!
by maxmcd | 2025-05-20 20:12:44+00:00
Looks like the code is here: https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/tree/v0.5

Really nice to see this, I wrote this comment almost 2 years ago when I was a little miffed about trying to use litestream and litefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614193

I think this solves most of the issues? You can now freely run litestream on your DB and not worry about issues with multiple writers? I wonder how the handoff is handled.

The read replica FUSE layer sounds like a real nice thing to have.

edit: Ah, it works like this: https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/pull/617

> When another Litestream process starts up and sees an existing lease, it will continually retry the lease acquisition every second until it succeeds. This low retry interval allows for rolling restarts to come online quickly.

Sounds workable!
by pc86 | 2025-05-20 20:13:04+00:00
Anyone can say A should mean B, that doesn't mean it's obviously true.

Very few services still commercially viable today actually force ads - meaning there is no paid tier available that removes them entirely.

I don't particularly like ads but this idea that any advertisement at any point for any good or service is by definition a cancer is a fringe idea, and a pretty silly one at that.
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-05-20 20:13:08+00:00
This is a manifestation of Coase's ceiling: the threshold of size at which the potential output of a system (organization, machine) falls below its internal friction (which increases faster with size). Above Coase's ceiling, a machine is paralyzed, but a human organization adapts by (consciously or not) altering its priorities, adopting stereotyped behaviors, etc.
by maclark25 | 2025-05-20 20:14:15+00:00
Hi - this (my) product analyses a video and makes everything in that video purchasable. It helps influencers make more money without changing their content or dealing with brand deals.

We have some early traction which is great, but I need to find smart ways to get this in front of more creators/ influencers. Do you, smart people, have any recommendations on how to do this?
by ljosifov | 2025-05-20 20:14:16+00:00
On Hugging face I see 4B and 2B versions now -

https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-3n-preview-6...

Gemma 3n Preview

google/gemma-3n-E4B-it-litert-preview

google/gemma-3n-E2B-it-litert-preview

Interesting, hope it comes on LMStudio as MLX or GGUF. Sparse and or MoE models make a difference when running on localhost. MoE Qwen3-30B-A3B most recent game changer for me. Activating only 3b weights on the gpu cores of sparse Qwen3-30B-A3B, rather than comparable ~30b of dense models (Qwen3-32B, Gemma3-27b, GLM-{4,Z1}-32B, older QwQ-32B), is a huge speedup for me: MoE A3B achieves 20-60 tps on my oldish M2 in LMStudio, versus only 4-5 tps for the dense models.

Looking forward to trying gemma-3n. Kudos to Google for open sourcing their Gemmas. Would not have predicted that the lab with "open" in the name has yet to release even v1 (atm at 0; disregarding gpt-2), while other labs, more commercial labs, are are at versions 3, 4 etc already.
by reitzensteinm | 2025-05-20 20:14:33+00:00
Well, my question would be whether retail minus 6% would be the prevailing rate in a free market with healthy competition, or is it a subsidy?

I'm not against subsidies. Germany pushing solar well before it made financial sense, enabling the economies of scale we see today, was one of the greatest wins of public policy in the 21st century. I paid a lot of tax when I lived there and was happy to contribute in some small way to that effort.

But subsidies risk turning into middle class welfare, continuing long after they make sense from a public policy point of view because interest groups form that don't want to give them up.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-20 20:14:37+00:00
Absolutely, the first task should be to understand how and why black boxes with emergent properties actually work, in order to further knowledge - but importantly, in order to improve them and build on the acquired knowledge to surpass them. That implies, curbing «parrot[ing]» and inadequate «understand[ing]».

I.e. those higher concepts are kept in mind as a goal. It is healthy: it keeps the aim alive.
by MrGilbert | 2025-05-20 20:14:57+00:00
Thank you! Yes, I'm aware of picotron, I tried the very first version of it. I think it's also a great environment. I first bought Voxatron years ago, because I really liked the tech behind it, and got kinda sad that it didn't evolve.

Anyways, thanks for pointing me to picotron! Think I'll have to keep an eye on both projects.^^
by dev_l1x_be | 2025-05-20 20:15:08+00:00
"In 1988, Sassenrath left Silicon Valley for the mountains of Ukiah valley, 2 hours north of San Francisco. From there he founded multimedia technology companies such as Pantaray, American Multimedia, and VideoStream. He also implemented the Logo programming language for the Amiga, managed the software OS development for CDTV, one of the first CD-ROM TV set-top boxes, and wrote the OS for Viscorp Ed, one of the first Internet TV set-top boxes."

What a legend!
by bradcray | 2025-05-20 20:15:36+00:00
@yubblegum: I'm afraid we don't have an update on support for Apple GPUs since last year's comment. While it comes up from time-to-time, nobody has opened an issue for it yet (please feel encouraged to!), and it isn't something we've had the chance to prioritize, where a lot of our recent work has focused on improving tooling support and addressing user requests.

I'll take your feedback about simplifying GPU-based installs back to our team, and have noted it on this thematically related issue: https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/25187#issuecomm...
by mrandish | 2025-05-20 20:15:47+00:00
> to win an Oscar being less than 5 years away.

You're assuming Oscar voting is primarily driven by film quality but this hasn't been true for a long time (if it ever was). Many academy voters are biased by whatever cultural and political trends are currently ascendant among the narrow subset of Hollywood creatives who belong to the academy (the vast majority of people listed in movie credits will never be academy voters). Due to the widespread impact of Oscar wins in major categories, voters heavily weight meta-factors like "what should the Hollywood community be seen as endorsing?"

No issue in recent memory has been as overwhelmingly central as AI replacing creatives among the Hollywood community. The entire industry is still recovering from the unprecedented strikes which shut down the industry and one of the main issues was the use of AI. The perception of AI use will remain cultural/political poison among the rarified community of academy voters for at least a decade. Of course, studios are businesses and will hire vendors who use AI to cut costs but those vendors will be smart enough to downplay that fact because it's all about perception - not reality. For the next decade "AI" will be to Academy-centric Hollywood what "child labor" is to shoe manufacturing. The most important thing is not that it doesn't happen, it's ensuring there's no clear proof it's happening - especially on any movie designed to be 'major category Oscar-worthy' (such films are specifically designed to check the requisite boxes for consideration from their inception). predict that in the near-term AI in the Oscars will be limited to, at most, a few categories awarded in the separate Technical Oscars (which aren't broadcast on TV or covered by the mainstream media).
by npalli | 2025-05-20 20:15:55+00:00
The sentence and paragraph which makes it clear that this was megabytes and not kilobytes

At a time when PC memory maxed out at 640 megabytes, the fact that the PCI bus could address 4 gigabytes meant that quite a few of its address bits were surplus. So we decided to increase the amount of data shipped in each bus cycle by using some of them as data. IIRC NV1 used 23 address bits, occupying 1/512th of the total space. 7 of the 23 selected one of the 128 virtual FIFOs, allowing 128 different processes to share access to the hardware. We figured 128 processes was plenty.
by theahura | 2025-05-20 20:16:10+00:00
> One key term to look for is "feature manifolds" or "multi-diemsnional features"

I should probably read the updates more. Not enough time in the day. But yea the way you're describing feature manifolds and multidimensional features, especially the importance of linearity-in-properties and not necessarily linearity-in-dimensions, makes a lot of sense and is basically how I default think about these things.

> but doesn't quite capture the technical nuance. So it's hard to know the full scope of what you intend.

Fair, I'm only passingly familiar with compressed sensing so I'm not sure I could offer a more technical definition without, like, a much longer conversation! But it's good to know in the future that in a technical sense linear representations and superposition are dependent.

> all features are linear, rather than just most or some

Potentially a tangent, but compared to what? I suppose the natural answer is "non linear features" but has there been anything to suggest that neural networks represent concepts in this way? I'd be rather surprised if they did within a single layer. (Across layers, sure, but that actually starts to pull me more towards circuits)