MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raydenvm | 2025-05-25 07:38:50+00:00
The path from cloud-first to self-hosted is common. Self-hosted options often enable enterprise deals that were previously impossible due to compliance requirements. However, the development overhead is significant. The key question is whether your addressable market size justifies the additional complexity.

The self-hosted pricing omes with a significant premium (often 2-3x cloud pricing) plus professional services revenue for implementation and support. Many companies find the professional services component becomes unexpectedly lucrative but resource-intensive.
by mattmanser | 2025-05-25 07:39:13+00:00
That's not actually true.

There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.

For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.

So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.

Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
by larusso | 2025-05-25 07:39:54+00:00
The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.

I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
by LoganDark | 2025-05-25 07:40:18+00:00
What do you miss about WinRAR? The ability to view an archive's contents without having to extract it first, and extract individual files? That can be achieved with BetterZip:

https://macitbetter.com

BetterZip also comes with a Quick Look plugin.

> The other one is Total Commander...

Maybe check out Transmit by Panic. It's technically a remote file transfer software, but can also be used for the local filesystem.

https://panic.com/transmit
by bemmu | 2025-05-25 07:41:17+00:00
I’m a full-time dev on the platform, here’s my take.

Roblox algo heavily favors games with good retention, that explains something like the first 50k concurrent users. But this game also has a lot word-of-mouth effect because the seeds for sale are the same for everyone, creating a Wordle-like effect of talking about the best thing to buy.
by phatskat | 2025-05-25 07:41:25+00:00
I remember learning XML and XSLT from library books in the late 90’s and found it interesting, but couldn’t find a use for it - I wasn’t really handling data in any meaningful way back then, it was all just hobby learning, but in the decades since I’ve touched XML _at all_ maybe three times? Once was a Salesforce integration I wish I could fully forget, the other times were client one-offs when they had a few things stored in XML that we needed to pipe into WordPress.
by badsectoracula | 2025-05-25 07:41:39+00:00
I had the same thought when i switched to Linux a few years ago - then i realized i can just run them under Wine :-P.

Though over time i switched to using Double Commander, an open source Total Commander clone written in Lazarus / Free Pascal, more than Total Commander itself since it runs natively on Linux and can do things like running programs such as xterm, but i still keep Total Commander installed since it can do some things better (or at least in a more familiar manner).

My default archiver is still WinRAR though.
by delusional | 2025-05-25 07:42:14+00:00
> it will be 100% clear to the user which application the file belongs to.

The most popular operating system hides it from the user, so clarity would not improve in that case. At leat one other (Linux) doesn't really use "extensions" and instead relies on magic headers inside the files to determine the format.

Otherwise I think the decision is largely aestethic. If you value absolute clarity, then I don't see any reason it won't work, it'll just be a little "ugly"
by attendant3446 | 2025-05-25 07:42:46+00:00
When I hear "dumb phone" I think of a device that can make calls and send and receive SMS, maybe a game of Snake and a radio that uses headphones as an antenna, and that's it. But how often do people use these things?

I have a dumb phone, with multiple SIM cards, I used it to receive SMS messages from different countries where they restrict the phone numbers for services and it has to be a local number. But other than that, it's not useful at all.

I kind of agree that today's smartphones are too much. I'd be happier with a mobile web browser (probably something like what Firefox OS was trying to do). But of course that have to be popular enough for companies to start making proper web apps (I'm looking at pretty much every bank now).
by blooalien | 2025-05-25 07:44:11+00:00
I dunno. Maybe you're expecting too much of them? They're obviously not gonna be like those massive data-center LLMs, but I've had some pretty good "brainstorming" sessions about code and documentation with Qwen and Gemma, and the latest vision-capable Qwen models do a really decent job of extracting data and text out of images (often more accurately than typical OCR engines) and even describing or captioning images, and for writing code, I've had good success with asking it to write me docstrings and type hints, and common "boilerplate" code, and even some pretty solid function requests that often come out exactly as I expected it to (as long as it's fed good "context" to work with, like some basic code-style rules, and access to library documentation and existing codebase).
by berkes | 2025-05-25 07:44:17+00:00
I understand why, but still lament that java applets where dropped like a hot potato, rather than solving the (fundamental) issues.

Back then, I learned Java, just to have fancy menus, quirky gimmicks and such. Until flash came along, nothing could do this. Where Java was rather open, free/libre, flash was proprietary and even patented. A big step back. And it took decades before JavaScript reached parity in possibilities to create such interactive, multimedia experiences in a cross-browserish way.

I can only imagine how much further along something like videoconferencing, realtime collaboration or gaming on the web would've been if this Java applet tech had been ever improving since inception.

(edit: I'm all for semantic, accessible ,clean HTML/CSS/JS in my web apps. But there's lots of use cases for gimmicks, fancy visuals, immersive experiences etc. and no, that's not the hotel-reservation-form or the hackers-forum. But art. Or fun. Or ?)
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-05-25 07:46:12+00:00
When you have a niche problem, you can usually reduce it in scope to such level, that you can make significantly better solution than trying to adapt some existing technology. It's not going to be universal, but for your niche problem, it can be much more suited.

Back in 2010, I started an open source project for identifying audio files based on fingerprints. I specifically designed everything, so that in the end I need to do super fast i32->i32 lookups on scale. There were many inverted indexes, but they are usually for text search, which has a lot of overhead I don't need. I ended up writing a completely custom solution, and it allowed me to scale to millions and millions of fingerprints on such small servers that it was unimaginable to anyone who ever ran audio fingerprinting system before.
by baq | 2025-05-25 07:47:15+00:00
You’re confusing engineering with maths. You engineer your prompting to maximize the chance the LLM does what you need - in your example, the true answer - to get you closer to solving your problem. It doesn’t matter what the LLM does internally as long as the problem is being solved correctly.

(As an engineer it’s part of your job to know if the problem is being solved correctly.)
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-05-25 07:48:05+00:00
Rules for thee, but not for me.

Seems like the current international order is if the US thinks you are violating international law they will kick the shit out of you, but if the US is violating international law they will also kick the shit out of you.

That still doesn’t answer the question of what US generals do when given an order which violates international law.
by sieve | 2025-05-25 07:48:55+00:00
> partition was driven by the British

The British absolutely had a role. One theory is the West needed a pliable state on India's west to guard the Arabian Sea from the Russians. A lot of Hindu politicians of the era were socialists. Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was a Fabian Socialist. What if India allied with Russia? Pakistan soon became a CENTO treaty member.

The thousand year Hindu-Muslim rivalry is the main driver, however. During the 16-18th centuries, European expeditions started hitting Indian shores, initially nibbling around the edges, and Muslim power on the subcontinent was comprehensively demolished by the Maratha Empire. The British drove out other European claimants and managed to wrest control over the subcontinent piece-by-piece.

Muslim elites did not mind ruling over majority-Hindu provinces for centuries. But loss of power and membership of a numerical minority creates insecurities and the idea of a separate Muslim nation started post 1857.

People can quibble about the origin of the idea and who is to blame. But no one can deny the fact that repeated massive riots between these communities (which are separate communities/religions, not ethnicities) in the decades leading to the partition signaled the inevitable.
by Incipient | 2025-05-25 07:49:22+00:00
The fundamental difference, which has been glossed over here, and people often don't think about is that AI as a tool is the first of its kind that is random-esque (yeah I know, non deterministic).

Imagine pressing G on a piano and sometimes getting a F, or A, depending on what the piano 'felt' like giving you.

So it definitely IS unlike a piano, brush, etc. What that means however in terms of skill/utility...I'm not too sure.
by tgv | 2025-05-25 07:49:49+00:00
NHST, which is part of frequentist statistics, is wrong, plain and simple. It answers the wrong question (what's the probability of the data given the hypothesis vs. what's the probability of the hypothesis given the data), and will favor H1 under conditions that can be manipulated in advance.

There is a total lack of understanding of how it works, but people think they know how to use it. There are numerous articles out there containing statements like "there were no differences in age between the groups (p > 0.05)". Consequently, it is the wrong thing to teach.

That's apart from the more philosophical question: what does it mean when I say that there's a 40% chance that it team A will beat team B in the match tomorrow?
by strogonoff | 2025-05-25 07:50:12+00:00
Thinking about a file format is a good way to clarify your vision. Even if you don’t want to facilitate interop, you’d get some benefits for free—if you can encapsulate the state of a particular thing that the user is working on, you could, for example, easily restore their work when they return, etc.

Some cop-out (not necessarily in a bad way) file formats:

1. Don’t have a file format, just specify a directory layout instead. Example: CinemaDNG. Throw a bunch of particularly named DNGs (a file for each frame of the footage) in a directory, maybe add some metadata file or a marker, and you’re good. Compared to the likes of CRAW or BRAW, you lose in compression, but gain in interop.

2. Just dump runtime data. Example: Mnemosyne’s old format. Do you use Python? Just dump your state as a Python pickle. (Con: dependency on a particular runtime, good luck rewriting it in Rust.)

3. Almost dump runtime data. Example: Anki, newer Mnemosyne with their SQLite dumps. (Something suggests to me that they might be using SQLite at runtime.) A step up from a pickle in terms of interop, somewhat opens yourself (but also others) to alternative implementations, at least in any runtime that has the means to read SQLite. I hope if you use this you don’t think that the presence of SQL schema makes the format self-documenting.

4. One or more of the above, except also zip or tar it up. Example: VCV, Anki.
by Voultapher | 2025-05-25 07:50:49+00:00
> However, you are expected not to care. Why? Because you're writing pure code but for the effects it invokes, but those effects could be pure or impure depending on context.

Does that work out in practice? Genuinely curious if anyone has experience with such systems at scale or in legacy applications where the original authors left long ago. I'm skeptical because in my experience not everything is or can be designed perfectly pure without abstraction leakage. At some point you need to understand all the behavior of a certain sub-system and the less clever the design is the easier that becomes in my experience.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-25 07:51:54+00:00
The brand of the equipment is a really small factor in the overall performance of the system. How each component performs is heavily dependent on specific environmental factors.

For example, noise of a single stage condenser might be justifiable from a maintenance standpoint if the unit is placed thoughtfully. Inverter units look fantastic on paper but they're a nightmare to work on in the field.

The insulation in your home should be the top focus if you are concerned with HVAC performance. It doesn't matter how many tons of cooling you have or how efficient and quiet it is if this isn't taken care of.

I've seen the dramatic difference in insulation performance during Texas summers. I thought the system on my current house was undersized by a few tons until I actually tried it out. I had a 5-ton system that struggled to hold a house at 78F running non-stop. Now, I have a 3-ton system that can hold 68F and still cycles off during the day. Both homes approximately the same size and within a few miles of each other.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-25 07:52:20+00:00
It is clearly a composite file format [1]:

> Acorn’s native file format is used to losslessly store layer data, editable text, layer filters, an optional composite of the image, and various metadata. Its advantage over other common formats such as PNG or JPEG is that it preserves all this native information without flattening the layer data or vector graphics.

As I've mentioned, this is a good use case for SQLite as a container. But ZIP would work equally well here.

[1] https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/docs/technotes/ACTN002.html
by inkyoto | 2025-05-25 07:52:44+00:00
> FWIW, I still think the US perception of the UK "surveillance state" is largely misplaced and is based on poor journalism about simple numbers of cameras that has never been adequately put into context.

Whilst the UK is not a «surveillance state» in the authoritarian sense, and they were certainly not the ones who invented CCTV, we must credit the British for pioneering the concept of ubiquitous CCTV as a tool of urban surveillance, which was complemented by a long-standing tradition of overzealous law enforcement – a legacy with undeniably robust historical roots. It is irrefutable that the UK was an early adopter of CCTV for security and policing purposes[0], much to the bemusement of the guests of Her Late Majesty and His Majesty now.

The British have certainly been instrumental – if not bestowing or spreading it (which is partially true, at least in the case of Australia and New Zealand), then at least influencing – in the widespread adoption of CCTV as a tool for urban surveillance in a large number of Western countries.

[0] One of the first significant deployments in Britain occurred in 1960, when temporary CCTV cameras were used to monitor the crowds at Trafalgar Square during a visit by the Thai royal family – https://www.farsight.co.uk/about-us/history/
by Derbasti | 2025-05-25 07:53:01+00:00
Especially at work, I find existing solutions often lacking. We tend to overestimate the complexity of reinventing many things, and underestimate the cost of ill-fitting abstractions.

In particular, Google-scale frameworks are usually harmfully over-engineered for smaller companies. Their challenge is solving the Google scale, not the problem at hand. At the same time, their complexity implies that a small-scale solution will likewise require a hundred-programmer team to implement.

But I find that far from the truth. In fact, many problems benefit from a purpose-built, small-scale solution. I've seen this work out many times, and result in much simpler, easier-to-debug code. Google-scale frameworks are a very bad proxy for estimating the complexity of a task.
by aabhay | 2025-05-25 07:53:02+00:00
Given the cited stats here and elsewhere as well as in everyday experience, does anyone else feel that this model isn’t significantly different, at least to justify the full version increment?

The one statistic mentioned in this overview where they observed a 67% drop seems like it could easily be reduced simply by editing 3.7’s system prompt.

What are folks’ theories on the version increment? Is the architecture significantly different (not talking about adding more experts to the MoE or fine tuning on 3.7’s worst failures. I consider those minor increments rather than major).

One way that it could be different is if they varied several core hyperparameters to make this a wider/deeper system but trained it on the same data or initialized inner layers to their exact 3.7 weights. And then this would “kick off” the 4 series by allowing them to continue scaling within the 4 series model architecture.
by nyanpasu64 | 2025-05-25 07:57:21+00:00
As I understand the Apple II has three useful voltage levels being sync, black, and white, with color being generated by alternating black and white?

The CXADC sounds interesting but unfortunately drops raw samples upon seeing input sync pulses unless you greatly decrease signal amplitude (which may be fine given it's 1-bit). I wonder if inverting the composite signal would bypass this. Alternatively the Domesday Duplicator is more expensive and may not be intended for composite signals. TBH I wonder if an ARM microcontroller could PLL to the sync pulses, sample the active signal digitally, and output a HDMI signal for a capture card (transmitting to a PC via the Pi Pico's 12 Mbit/s USB is marginal).

While researching LumaCode (similarly based on extracting digital signals from retro hardware) I came across RGBtoHDMI and https://lukazi.blogspot.com/2022/02/apple-ii-video-to-hdmi-u.... I have not read the article but it may be useful.
Ask HN: As a customer, how to stop non-criminal misconduct with small damages?
by john01dav | 2025-05-25 07:57:43+00:00
In our society, we have 2 systems for dealing with misconduct: enormously expensive lawyers and courts, and police (which often feed into the former). The former is effective if the money amounts in the dispute are large enough to justify paying for lawyers and filing fees, and everyone involved has the money to do so or high quality representation is available on contingency. The latter flatly refuses to deal with non criminal matters. But, not all reasonable (meaning that someone has done business in a dishonest way or has made a mistake and then refuses to make it right) claims fall into these categories.

Examples, that I have personally experienced in the last year, include:

- buy a used car from a private party who modifies the car between the mechanic inspection and delivery of the car such that it's degraded. This cost me $800 in parts to fix, as they swapped a part for a part from a different brand of car, thus making it unsafe via incompatibility

- a store sells sealed food that upon opening is damaged and inedible, refuses return and compensation for my time going back, and credit card company has blanket policy of no charge backs on food

- store says that they have an item that I need in a time sensitive manner, then doesn't have it over a weekend when all stores are closed. Root causes is inventory software not reflecting reality. Refuses to make it right. Making it right would be sending an employee to the next city over to fetch the item, or compensating me for costs in doing so. They said that they'd sell x on y date then failed to do so. I'd have gotten it earlier from other places before the weekend had they not given me false information. I understand that such mistakes happen, but not making it right after making a mistake is unacceptable

- private seller lies about an appliance and disguises the appliance to look like one type when it's another, then refuses to reverse transaction or compensate for lost time

On some of these things, some prevention seems theoretically possible, but that isn't a viable solution because the level of time and effort that's needed to do that in all cases is unrealistic. Furthermore, many of these (such as the appliance, car, and food item) are outright scams. Placing the blame and responsibility to fix it on victims rather than perpetrators is illegitimate.

What can I do when someone successfully pulls such a scam on me? There's a limited amount of this shit that I can tolerate before losing my sanity, and I'm very close to this point. We're supposed to have rules, but it seems impossible to enforce these rules so we might as well live in a free for all, but that's unacceptable to me. I demand accountability.
by krackers | 2025-05-25 07:58:04+00:00
I don't see what ASLR has to do with the inability to convert a shared to static library though. In fact a shared library must be position independent so if anything it would make the job easier. For going from static (non-PIC) to shared, W^X is probably why modern dynamic linkers don't support patching text segment.

Tools like Statifier to convert an executable + its dylibs into a statically linked executable are sort of an in-between hack that does the equivalent of prelinking. But that's not converting a shared library to a static library, because the result isn't an object file that can be linked.

I guess I never stated the punchline explicitly, but boricj's tool seems to prove that there is in fact no such theoretical limitation in converting from shared -> static library. It's a bit hacky of course, but you can indeed reconstruct relocation tables with decompiler-like analysis to go back from executable -> object file for any function, and this also implies you can go from shared library -> static library.