MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmx1 | 2025-05-21 05:47:18+00:00
I am not suggesting NT is dead on servers at all. I am positing it would be dead had it not been for owning the majority of desktops. Those use cases are primarily driven as an ancillary service to Windows desktop[1], and where they have wider applicability, like .NET and SQL Server, have been progressively unleashed from Windows. The realm of standalone server products were bulldozed by Linux; NT wouldn't have stood a chance either.

[1]: In fact, Active Directory was specifically targeted by EU antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
by Animats | 2025-05-21 05:47:35+00:00
Just looked at that roadmap.[1] Good to know they are thinking about that.

I've discussed this in the context of Rust renderers. There are about four of them, and they all sit on top of Vulkan and export roughly similar APIs. The API is roughly comparable to three.js - meshes, textures, materials, lights, shadows, and updating are supported. They all get to the point where they can load static glTF scenes, and then the devs hit the hard concurrency problems and bail.

That's a much more comfortable level for users who need to get something done in 3D. Vulkan level belongs to people who write engines.

Getting off topic, though. This is not a retro problem. This is a current problem.

Further discussion on the Vulkan roadmap request for comments on Discord, here.[2]

[1] https://vulkan.org/user/pages/09.events/vulkanised-2025/T2-T...

[2] https://discord.com/channels/427551838099996672/115155677637...
by ta20240528 | 2025-05-21 05:48:05+00:00
> Its Western assumption that China wants to escape the USD reserve currency.

Nah, they have a lot of them, they don't want their value to drop.

What the world wants is to escape (at least in the medium term) is the US oversight that forces the USA's enemies to be everyone else's enemies.

From what I can tell, they are going to use (are using) Hong Kong as a ex-USA location to price and trade USD - modeled on the Eurodollar. With a lot of trade-with-China being settled in their e-CNY CBDC.

As a poster alluded to - the big loss for the USA is the insights into pricing and demand.

Nascent, but that's the trend AFAICT.
by brudgers | 2025-05-21 05:52:20+00:00
[There is no detail to the question. This answer is generic]

Working is the most important UX element and if it works it is good enough to ship.

If it doesn’t work, then other aspects of the UX are irrelevant…there are no users to use what doesn’t work and if you can’t make it work UX resources aren’t going to help anything other than help you avoid the big problem.

Should you learn some design? Of course, but the only way to learn design is by designing…it’s like singing and keepee-uppee, no book can show you how to carry a tune or get you to ten juggles.

So to reiterate, ship.

Good luck.
Ask HN: I Built BabyMusic AI – Custom Songs for Infant Brain Development
by simplysparsh | 2025-05-21 05:53:25+00:00
I came across a study showing that certain types of music exposure can make infants more pitch-accurate — even musically gifted. That led me down a rabbit hole of research on how music impacts infant development: from speech acquisition to emotional regulation to better sleep.

At the same time, I realized how harmful popular content like Cocomelon can be — overstimulating and neurologically addictive during critical stages of brain development.

Then I saw this: “baby music” is searched over 700K times/month. Clearly, parents are looking — but there's almost nothing that’s science-backed and personalized.

So I built BabyMusic.ai — a tool that creates custom songs for babies based on their name, age, and developmental needs. Songs are designed using principles from neuroscience, music therapy, and ethnomusicology, and tuned for real routines like bedtime, playtime, or speech practice.

No screens. No noise. Just emotionally resonant, brain-boosting music. Many parents say they teared up the first time they heard their baby’s name in a lullaby.

Looking for advice on:

How do I find the right early users for this?

What channels have worked for you to reach new parents, especially beyond Instagram/TikTok?

How would you price something that’s highly emotional, yet science-backed?

What would make something like this 10x more valuable?

Would you ever gift this to a new parent?

What would you add or remove from the product?

Check it out at https://babymusic.ai/
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-21 05:53:33+00:00
+1

NASA's Common Metadata Repository is worth exploring too https://github.com/nasa/Common-Metadata-Repository

It is a neat example of how an org can structure and manage multiple projects and services in a single git repository. They've use Leiningen to achieve their objective.

> The Common Metadata Repository (CMR) is an earth science metadata repository for NASA EOSDIS data. The CMR Search API provides access to this metadata.

> Building and Running the CMR

> The CMR is a system consisting of many services. The services can run individually or in a single process. Running in a single process makes local development easier because it avoids having to start many different processes. The sections below contain instructions for running the CMR as a single process or as many processes.

(edit: add relevant context for quick reference)
by ipdashc | 2025-05-21 05:54:17+00:00
I've always wondered why data centers aren't taking off more in places like Iceland (cheap geothermal) or Quebec (cheap hydro). Both of these places are also pretty cold and one would think this benefits cooling.

There are periodically news articles and such about data centers in Iceland, of course, but I get the impression it's mostly a fad, and the real build-outs are still in Northern Virginia as they've always been.

The typical answer I've seen is that Internet access and low latency matter more than cooling and power, but LLMs seem like they wouldn't care about that. I mean, you're literally interacting with them over text, and there's already plenty of latency - a few extra ms shouldn't matter?

I'd assume construction costs and costs of shipping in equipment also play a role, but Iceland and Canada aren't that far away.
by airstrike | 2025-05-21 05:54:32+00:00
The current political landscape of the US is not far-right. The current government may be, but everything in life is cyclical.

Democrats in 2024 lost more votes relative to 2020 than Republicans gained between the two elections. Which is why some people say Kamala "lost to the couch"--which is a comforting but myopic take because losing to the couch means your arguments are less convincing than those of the other party
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-05-21 05:55:20+00:00
> On a previous project we swapped out our web server three different times

Why is this desirable?

On all my projects over the past 10 years, I’ve swapped out the web server exactly zero times because the one I have works just fine. The parent comment describes these components as “production grade”, but then if that’s the case, what could be the reason for swapping them out other than self-indulgence?
by ycombinatornews | 2025-05-21 05:55:33+00:00
I’m building https://instantlyfluent.com, a small project to help people and myself practice languages before travel. It works through voice or text chats with AI.

I tried Gliglish but didn’t like how it was structured. So I started turning my own “learn a language before a trip” routine into something easier to use.

Dutch is not supported yet, and there are still some rough edges. But the idea is simple: help people remember words by using them. You say or type something, and get a reply you can hear or read.

In conversations on IF, there is no fixed path. You can start with a topic, then ask to switch to something else. It’s meant to be low-pressure and flexible.

Still figuring things out. Happy to share more or hear from others working on similar tools.
by weatherlite | 2025-05-21 05:55:58+00:00
> The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.

I agree , but that's the negative. The positive will be that almost any service you can imagine (medical diagnosis, tax preparation, higher education) will come down to zero, and with a lag of perhaps a decade or two it will meet us in the physical world with robo-technicians, surgeons and plumbers. The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the land, and will be finished in 1/10 of the time it takes today. The main problem to me is that there's a lag between the negatives and the positives. We're starting out with the negatives and the benefits may take a decade or two to reach us all equally.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-05-21 05:56:52+00:00
I don't quite understand where regex gets its reputation from. I think that once you remember the meaning of the operators, it's not too bad. (And the concise syntax is actually very helpful.)

I get that the meaning of the operators is not clear unless you're already familiar with regex, but neither is the meaning of !, ?, %, &, |, ^, ~, &&, ||, <<, >>, *, //, &, ++ (prefix), ++ (postfix), and so on. You learn these because you need them once, and then they're burned into your mind forever. Regex was similar for me.
by chii | 2025-05-21 05:57:40+00:00
> ...But they did quite recently, in a time period that is broadly viewed as a very good one.

i dont think the above time period was considered a sacrifice, and the idea that moving the manufacturing back to america would restore that time period is wrong. Because the world has moved on, and productivity has increased so much by now, that it definitely would be a sacrifice if conditions returned back to said time period.
by krackers | 2025-05-21 05:58:18+00:00
Someone extracted out the dims in https://twitter.com/cccntu/status/1925043973170856393#m

It seems to be embedding from 262k possible vocab tokens down to 256 dims. 262144 matches the same vocab size used for the existing Gemma model, so it really does seem to be an embedding of the input token directly, fed into each layer.

I guess intuitively it might help the model somewhat for later layers to have direct access to the input query without needing to encode it in the residual stream, and it can use those parameters for something else. I'm kind of surprised no one tried this before, if the idea is that simple? Reminds me of resnet where you have the "skip" layers so future layers can access the input directly.

Edit: As for what exactly the embedding is used for, it could be that the embedding is still used for something more clever than induction head-type stuff. Responses in [1] suggest it might be some low-rank data/token dependent signal that can be "factored out"/precomputed. Another clever suggestion was that it's a per-layer input-token-derived control/steering vector.

[1] https://twitter.com/CFGeek/status/1925022266360005096
by visarga | 2025-05-21 05:58:28+00:00
My favorite argument against SP is zero shot translation. The model learns Japanese-English and Swahili-English and then can translate Japanese-Swahili directly. That shows something more than simple pattern matching happens inside.

Besides all arguments based on model capabilities, there is also an argument from usage - LLMs are more like pianos than parrots. People are playing the LLM on the keyboard, making them 'sing'. Pianos don't make music, but musicians with pianos do. Bender and Gebru talk about LLMs as if they work alone, with no human direction. Pianos are also dumb on their own.
by mitechworld | 2025-05-21 05:59:01+00:00
I have recently built a tool to create animated flowcharts: https://flowyboard.com/. I was thinking that the moment I launch it and announce it in the hackernews as a post, it would explode!! I was naive! The reality is so damn difficult, even if there is no competitor for your tool! As a solo founder, doing my eveyday full-time job and working on my app in the weekends, doing natrual marketing takes time, But I guess that's the way. Now, if you know better ways, let me know. BTW, check the tool and give your honest feedback please.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-21 05:59:17+00:00
> my guess, combined with the fact that “70” is clearly stamped on after the fact, is that these are TMM2064P chips that have been tested and certified to work at even faster speeds like 70ns. Generally the fastest RAM you need on a board like this is for the linebuffer, so that’d be my guess here.

Overlooking a small detail there: the fastest RAM on that board would be the 2 chips marked MCM2016HN45 (the -45 means 45ns for that part, which is pretty fast for a RAM chip made in 1986).

Anyway, very nice & detailed writeup!
by guappa | 2025-05-21 05:59:39+00:00
> Win32 apps have strong support for selecting multiple files to pass to the app from within the file select dialog

The problem is when you want to click a file on your file manager and you want it to open in the associated application. Because the file manager can only hope the associated application parses the escapes the same way it generates them. Otherwise it's file not found :)

I'm not going to bother to reply point by point since you completely missed the point in the first few words.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-05-21 05:59:58+00:00
We've already had our first few "trusted the AI" bugs in production.

Now that leadership has decreed AI for all, and is handing out Cursor licenses left right and centre, I look forward to more pain.

A doctor in my area once explained why caffeinated alcoholic drinks were worse than regular alcohol.

Alcohol helps you do dumb shit, the caffeine helps you do dumb shit for longer.

I feel like there's a good rephrase for LLM and devs.
by guptadeepak | 2025-05-21 06:00:06+00:00
I've spent years implementing authentication systems across dozens of projects, and the landscape has changed dramatically. While Auth0 remains a strong player, many organizations now seek alternatives due to cost concerns at scale, need for specialized compliance features, or desire for greater developer control.

The technical tradeoffs between solutions are significant:

For commercial options, implementation complexity varies substantially. SSOJet and FusionAuth provide developer-friendly APIs with streamlined deployment, while Ping Identity excels at complex hybrid deployments but requires specialized expertise. Microsoft Entra ID offers impressive reliability metrics but presents challenges for non-Microsoft stacks.

On the open-source side, the architectural differences are striking. Keycloak provides enterprise-grade features but demands significant expertise for secure deployment and scaling. Ory's cloud-native, API-first approach aligns perfectly with microservices architectures but has a steeper learning curve. Supertokens prioritizes developer experience with excellent SDKs but offers a narrower feature set.

The most interesting technical consideration is deployment flexibility. I've found this dramatically impacts long-term maintenance costs and security posture. Solutions like Ping Identity and Microsoft offer robust hybrid models, while container-optimized architectures in Ory and Keycloak provide different advantages for DevOps-focused teams.

I'm curious: What authentication patterns are you seeing emerge in your own systems? Are you finding that the traditional username/password paradigm is finally fading in favor of passwordless approaches, or are regulatory requirements keeping traditional methods entrenched?

This is from a longer article I wrote on authentication alternatives. Read the full post here: https://guptadeepak.com/beyond-auth0-a-comprehensive-guide-t...

Deepak
by zeta0134 | 2025-05-21 06:00:07+00:00
I'm translating my current videogame project into Toki Pona! It's delightful fun, but also a bit tricky at times. The tiny vocabulary makes it difficult to come up with unambiguous ways to refer to in-game mechanics. The lack of pronounceable numbers is also a minor pain, but the community seems to mostly be okay with using arabic numerals as an escape valve, and letting the reader choose which pronunciation system they prefer.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-21 06:02:26+00:00
So, first of all, that’s an economics formula: they tend to be extreme simplifications to demonstrate a relationship between variables. Of course, that means they’re often wrong or useless. Sort of like if all physics formulas were “cow diameter=(food-waste)/2” or “car velocity=gas pedal depth-brake pedal depth.” Sometimes economists jokingly call it the “dismal science”; what they don’t mention is that the term came from a paper arguing that slavery was superior to abolition - an argument made with many of the same reasoning errors, oversimplifications and lack of perspective that clouds modern economics. Our modern sciences are not quite as evolved as we would like to believe.

- - -

Now, to your question: this is an oversimplification, but most money that’s not in a mattress somewhere is being lent out (invested.) If I have $500 in a bank account, my bank will turn around and lend my $500 to Bob’s Construction Corp or to Mary for a car loan or whatever. In practice things are a lot more complex, but the portion of money that’s sitting still in a mattress or a vault is fairly small. This means that if I get a dividend, money is moved from one bank account to the next, and the amount of investment doesn’t change.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-05-21 06:03:20+00:00
"It’s a scary thought. You might even consider it ridiculously farfetched. I wouldn’t expect you to agree with me based on a blog post. However, what I would recommend is that you give it some serious thought, and maybe conduct a similar experiment of your own. If you do, let me know how you get on. I’d be genuinely interested to find out." there are no comments on your blog so i am not sure i can express any of my opinions there
by guappa | 2025-05-21 06:03:22+00:00
How long has fork() existed? Is it less than 10 year? Is it much much more?

> just google for "fork deadlock"

I did, results were completely unrelated to what you're talking about.

Anyway libraries spawning hidden threads… I bet they don't even bother to use reentrant functions? I mean… ok they are written by clueless developers. There's lots and lots of them, they exist on windows too. What's your point?

That's
by epistasis | 2025-05-21 06:04:35+00:00
When Apple wants to raise money, it could go issue more shares and sell them on the stock market, and their shares are in high demand because expected future earnings are high.

With the US, the expected future utility of a dollar is very very high, at least far higher than most other currencies.

Combine that with the need for enough currency to be in circulation to support the size of the global economy, and you might call it a "free lunch" or you might call it "something that only an utter fucking idiot would ever risk giving away."

And it's certainly not the foundation of our economy, not at all. The foundation of our economy is large tech stocks, absolutely monstrously high GDP, massive investment in the future via scientific discovery, extremely robust protections against corruption that let entrepreneurs flourish, and a military backing it all. The "free lunch" is the reward for topping the rest of the world in all those areas.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-21 06:05:11+00:00
The IP is important. Not only did you use $50 in parts, but the design, software, and marketing were done in the states. One critical flaw in MAGA thinking is that these inputs are worthless: the full value of an iPhone comes from China because that’s where it was assembled even if most of the value was actually added in the USA. China wants to be on the other side of the value chain as well and really don’t mind swapping places with the US (and it looks like that will happen long term now due to Trumpism).
by omeid2 | 2025-05-21 06:06:12+00:00
> The problem is that models are shipping that inherently make it easy to reproduce copyrighted works, and apply specific styles lifted from single author's copyrighted bodies of work. > I am very strongly against this. > Note that prohibiting copying of a recognizable specific single author's style is even more strict than fair use limits on humans. Stricter makes sense to me, because unlike humans, models are mass producers.

This sounds like gate-keeping rather than genuine copyright concerns.

> Models that make it trivial to create new art deco works, consistent with the total body of art deco works, ok. Models that make it trivial to recreate Erte works, or with an accurately Erte style specifically. Not ok.

Yeah, again, sounds like gate-keeping more than an economic and incentives argument which are, in my opinion, the only legitimate concerns underpinning copyright's moral ground.

Every step of progress has made doing things easier and easier to the point that now arguing with some strange across the world seems trivial, almost natural. Surely there are some arguments to curtail this dangerous machinery that undermines the control of information flow and corrupts the minds of the naive! we must shut it down!

Jokes aside, "making things easier/trivial" is the name of the game of progress. You can't stop progress. Everything will be easier and easier as the time goes on.
by johschmitz | 2025-05-21 06:06:16+00:00
I never hated on Signal, on the contrary I recommend it too many people but I can say that the energy consumption on Android is in many cases abysmal for multiple years now and related issues in the Github issue tracker are being ignored. This is for me unacceptable for someone claiming to build high quality software and accepting my donations.

Related issues:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/13704 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/12341 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10336 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9729
by huevosabio | 2025-05-21 06:07:05+00:00
> The counter factual to reducing trade isn’t that we would manufacture the equivalent amount of goods here and be just as rich.

> It’s that we would be poorer. And certain goods would cease to exist, and all of us would have to learn to live with less because it’s simply infeasible to manufacture everything here.

This should be in billboards all over the US. I don't get what is so hard to understand.

Globalization made us all richer and gave us the luxury to pursue new technology.

Self-sufficiency points towards subsistence farming.
by hunglee2 | 2025-05-21 06:08:52+00:00
US GDP is grossly inflated by 'services' many of which are non-productive, even deleterious to society. Healthcare is probably the best example of this, I believe it is 10-15% of US economy, yet health outcomes for the people can be extraordinary poor, seeing as majority of bankruptcies in the country are as a result of healthcare costs incurred. We need to find a way to separate 'good' vs 'bad' GDP because the measure is way too crude
by pyrale | 2025-05-21 06:09:40+00:00
I work as a swe in a company dominated by EEs and civil engineers, and while you’re not wrong in theory, the author’s point resonates a lot with me.

Civil engineers mostly plan ahead and try to follow that plan, and having to adapt to too many unforeseen issues is a sign of failure (which is not surprising, since planning is a small fraction of the cost).

In software engineering, the opposite is true: large big-design-upfront projects are usually a trainwreck.

In my experience, it is pretty hard to explain the difference to civil engineers that evolved into leadership.