MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-06-09 16:41:23+00:00
Perhaps for cars.

For other topics, say apps? Well…

A while back I was looking for interesting apps for my Apple Watch to see if I could find some real benefit to keeping it. Even before GenAI I was finding listicles like these that always have date stamps as if they are recent news: https://techidroid.com/10-best-apps-for-apple-watch/#5_ViewR... (as I read it, it says "March 6, 2025" and lists ViewRanger app as number 5 on their list; I have no idea what it will say to anyone else).

Now here's the important thing: I used to work at Augmentra, who made the ViewRanger app. They merged with OutdoorActive years ago and shut down the ViewRanger app in 2022.

So, I've not trusted Google for a while now.
by metadat | 2025-06-09 16:41:40+00:00
In the mid 2000's I had a Linux server which was part of an EFnet eggdrop network which stayed online for more than 3 years, almost 4 full years, without rebooting. Haha.

Professionally, not long, the business has always wanted to reduce the risk of a security incident infinitely more than keeping a server up without restarting.

Unprofessionally, from 2019-2023 I achieved more 1,200 days of uptime on a public facing server. The only reason is because of how risky it can be to apply updates to some machines - you never know if some boot error will pop up and require driving across town and fiddling with for several hours. Amusingly, I checked it for updates this weekend and Ubuntu (note: I really don't recommend Ubuntu, Debian is so much better in every way I know of these days? Live Patch support was expired! How that nice.

Of course, YMMV. Yolo!

Sidenote: Achieving 10 year+ uptimes with BSD isn't difficult or particularly noteworthy at all, which I find impressive.
by vessenes | 2025-06-09 16:41:46+00:00
Thanks for working on this guys. The current tax code is fairly crazy: you could spend a few million in salaries, sell 200k of software in a year and possibly owe taxes on that. Even if the company would otherwise be shutting down.

The traditional capital asset treatment applied to software leaves a lot to be desired. Some software is a capital asset, but much just isn’t. Or at least should be considered to depreciate rapidly.
by morkalork | 2025-06-09 16:41:52+00:00
I think I could be happy switching between the two modes. There's tasks that are completely repetative slop that I've fully offloaded to AI with great satisfaction. There's others I enjoy that I prefer to use AI for consultation only. Regardless, few people liked doing code review before with their peers and somehow we've increased one of the least fun parts of the job.
by saulpw | 2025-06-09 16:41:58+00:00
This is pretty reductive. Many people want to pump some new thoughts they had into an AI to generate something tolerable to post on their blog. The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are. But they can't just post 200 words of bullet points (or don't feel like they can, anyway). So the AI is an assistant which takes their thoughts and makes them look acceptable for publication.
by reginald78 | 2025-06-09 16:42:04+00:00
Great info in this post with some uncommon questions answered. I have a 3060 with unimpressive idle power consumption, interesting that it varies so much.

I know it would increase the idle power consumption, but have you considered a server platform instead of Ryzen to get more lanes?

Even so, you could probably get at least 4x for 4 cards without getting to crazy. 2 m.2 -> pcie adapters, the main GPU slot and the fairly common 4x wired secondary slot.

Splitting the main 16x GPU slot is possible but whenever I looked into this I kind of found the same thing you did. In addition to being a cabling/mounting nightmare the necessary hardware started to eat up enough total system cost that just ponying up for a 3090 started to make more sense.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-06-09 16:43:12+00:00
The revolving door is tragic. I work among policymakers, people who have spent years at FCC, FAA, FDA, and when it's time to leave those agencies where do they go? To the revolving door. Policy is such a highly specialized field that the only place to get a job is with a government affairs firm, or company working in that industry who needs your expertise to.. work with government.

It's like any other specialized industry. Your skills are not always transferable and it makes the job pool quite narrow, and geographic.
by taeric | 2025-06-09 16:44:29+00:00
The account of the final weaving of the bridge is awesome. I'd imagine it isn't much different from any job you can do while "dangling," but still. Wow.

I am curious on the idea that wheels would not have been helpful? I get that full blown carriages and such would have been a bit of work to use, but it isn't like a wheel barrow isn't already useful.

I'm also curious on how they wound the rope without some sort of wheel involved?
by sifuhotman2000 | 2025-06-09 16:44:39+00:00
I see new engineers adopting AI much faster than the older ones who have been doing all the coding themselves. I very often see senior engineers turing of their copilot after a week out of frustration because it doesnt work the way they want them to, but they arent even trying, they expect it to work 100% in their first try I guess. They spend months learning new technologies to best of their ability but they wont give AI a chance? They think using AI will make them less skilled, but it is not true, it will make them more productive.
by abeppu | 2025-06-09 16:44:46+00:00
> I would never bring a dog with me outside to do anything other than go for a walk, always on a leash. They really don't belong in public spaces.

This seems a bit extreme. I think dog owners have a responsibility to make sure their animal is trained and able to be controlled near people, but outdoor public spaces (parks/plazas, cafes with outdoor seating whose management is dog friendly), seem fine.

However, the responsibility for your dog's behavior extends even outside of public space. I was bitten by a dog in the lobby of a friend's building. The dog was leashed and presumably just returning from a walk. Later, I heard that some inspections in that building had to be rescheduled because a dog bit one of the inspectors while inside one of the condos (not sure if it was the same dog). Being in a non-public space in no way reduces the owner's responsibility.
by timr | 2025-06-09 16:44:59+00:00
That's not fair, and not what I am saying at all.

I enjoy writing code. I just don't enjoy writing code that I've written a thousand times before. It's like saying that Picasso should have enjoyed painting houses for a living. They're both painting, right?

(to be painfully clear, I'm not comparing myself to Picasso; I'm extending on your metaphor.)
by bigyabai | 2025-06-09 16:45:14+00:00
Why would anyone buy one? Every parent in America knows their kid would hate them if they unboxed an Xbox handheld instead of the Switch 2 on Christmas. Not to mention, the Switch 2 is cheaper, easier to operate, has a library of kid-friendly and hardware-tailored games, and doesn't partner with Snoop Dogg to market the product. You're left with a small market of enthusiast and hardcore customers that probably treat your product like a novelty instead of a real competitor. It makes sense why Microsoft doesn't really care.

Xbox owners don't want one because they can already play Game Pass stuff. Their money is better spent on a Playstation or Switch. PC gamers also already have Game Pass, so if a bigger library is what they want then they should buy a Switch or Playstation too.

Ironically, if a Switch/PS5 owner wants to experience Microsoft's best exclusives, the Steam Deck is their cheapest option.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-09 16:45:44+00:00
My company recently issued an "Use AI in your workflow or else" mandate and it has absolutely destroyed my motivation to work

Even though there are still private whispers of "just keep doing what you're doing no one is going to be fired for not using AI", just the existence of the top down mandate has made me want to give up and leave

My fear is that this is every company right now, and I'm basically no longer a fit for this industry at all

Edit: I'm a long way from retirement unfortunately so I'm really stuck. Not sure what my path forward is. Seems like a waste to turn away from my career that I have years of experience doing, but I struggle like crazy to use AI tools. I can't get into any kind of flow with them. I'm constantly frustrated by how aggressively they try to jump in front of my thought process. I feel like my job changed from "builder" to "reviewer" overnight and reviewing is one of the least enjoyable parts of the job for me

I remember an anecdote about Ian McKellen crying on a green screen set when filming the Hobbit, because Talking to a tennis ball on a stick wasn't what he loved about acting

I feel similarly with AI coding I think
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-09 16:45:47+00:00
People tend to overestimate the amount of calories they can burn through increased activity or exercise.

Walking a mile will burn about 100 calories, give or take. That's not much. A latte from Starbucks or a "healthy" snack such as a granola bar has more.

Good rule of thumb is that you cannot offset a bad diet with exercise for weight loss. Diet is by far more impactful. Exercise has other benefits though, which I'm not intending to dismiss.
by dang | 2025-06-09 16:46:42+00:00
The number of threads and the comments in those threads.

e.g. from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208063

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208875

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207240

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205579

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205479

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44204864

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44204808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44188578

I realize listing a few examples doesn't prove anything, but when I've skim these threads, I see lots of comments like that and few counterarguments. Hence my impression.
by TachyonicBytes | 2025-06-09 16:47:02+00:00
I use whisperfile[1] directly. The whisper-large-v3 model seems good with non-English transcription, which is my main use-case.

I am also eyeing whisperX[2], because I want to play some more with speaker diarization.

Your use-case seems to be batch transcription, so I'd suggest you go ahead and just use whisperfile, it should work well on an M4 mini, and it also has an HTTP API if you just start it without arguments.

If you want more interactivity, I have been using Vibe[3] as an open-source replacement of SuperWhisper[4], but VoiceInk from a sibling comment seems better.

Aside: It seems that so many of the mentioned projects use whisper at the core, that it would be interesting to explicitly mark the projects that don't use whisper, so we can have a real fundamental comparison.

[1] https://huggingface.co/Mozilla/whisperfile

[2] https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

[3] https://github.com/thewh1teagle/vibe/

[4] https://superwhisper.com/
by xnorswap | 2025-06-09 16:47:21+00:00
The UK has (had) a tax credit for "Research and Development", intended to be a tax break for genuine R&D, but of course everyone lumped all software development into.

The UK eventually put out guidance that business as usual development isn't really "research and development", but afaik there hasn't been a serious crackdown on the practice.

It seems kind of absurd to pretend that most work that developers do is pioneering the profession.

R&D tax breaks make sense, both to encourage genuine research but also to prevent brain-drain.

Not taxing (or tax credits / refunds ) for line-of-business software isn't really excusable.

It's bad that the law in the US has been changed in a cliff-edge way though.
by lostdog | 2025-06-09 16:47:26+00:00
Interesting that YC is jumping on this tax code thing, but the shitty tax situation for employees trying to hold onto the equity they've earned is just ignored.

The number one problem for startup employees is that the AMT tax makes it impossible to exercise options in a company that is doing well. YC is showing us that they will fight for changes to the tax code when it benefits their bottom line directly, but are silent when it comes to helping startup employees hold onto equity that they have earned.

Think carefully before joining a YC startup as an employee.
by ben_w | 2025-06-09 16:48:06+00:00
This is a long-standing trend with AI.

Often people will say "AI will never do X, or at least it will take decades", and then it does X, and it turns out you can cheat a lot to get X done really easily.

I'm old enough to remember when X was "play chess at top level", followed by 19 years of X = "play Go at top level". Irregardless of what you think of GenAI, the script writers of I, Robot chose X = "compose music and draw pictures".
by kevindamm | 2025-06-09 16:48:19+00:00
it is possible that it did throw an alarm but the behavior ceased soon enough afterwards that it didn't escalate to alert-level paging, or that -- even if it did -- those resources were back to normal within a few minutes that it took to open laptop, password password OTP, link-following and graph-referencing annnd oh it's already coming back down before the status update is drafted.

And 40kqps isn't really much at the scale of Focus (or most of Google's APIs) so I could easily see it going under the radar, especially each using different IP addrs and with IPv6 across /64.

The gap worth noticing here isn't monitoring, though, it's the zero rate limiting on js_disabled flow using a token borrowed from an earlier js enabled flow.
by pmdr | 2025-06-09 16:48:30+00:00
> Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI “dating concierge” that will interact with other users’ concierges until the chatbots find a good fit.

> Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month.

Seriously, what is wrong with these people?
by wulfgarbet | 2025-06-09 16:48:43+00:00
When a company that earns $150k/yr and hires a software engineer who costs $100k/yr, that company should be able to deduct that salary in full.

The way it works today they must amortize it, taking only 20% per year. So they’d owe taxes on $130k of $150k, instead of the more rational $50k of $150k.

This effort is to restore rationality.
by rchaud | 2025-06-09 16:48:47+00:00
Websites today exist to sell things.

Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites.

There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.
by robomartin | 2025-06-09 16:48:54+00:00
Signed.

That said, here's my perspective on 174 (which should be reverted to full deduction on the year the expense is incurred).

You do not have to amortize 100% of your engineering costs. Not even close.

Here's the key:

Development costs incurred to remove uncertainty are amortized. All other costs are deductible during the tax year where they are incurred.

How does this work?

You are going to design a new robot arm.

In January, you spend $100K to "remove uncertainty". In rough strokes, this means discovering all the things you don't know and need to know for this robot arm to become a product. This amount will be amortized over five years under 174.

Now, with uncertainty removed, you spend an additional $1.1MM from January until December for engineering implementation. No uncertainty being removed. Just building a product. This is 100% deductible that tax year.

Analogy: You want to build a new brick wall with specific properties. You spend $100K to develop a new type of brick and $1.1MM to build the wall using that brick. The $100K is amortized, the $1.1MM is deductible in one shot.

BTW, at year 6 the amortization schedule reaches steady-state and you are amortizing the full $100K every year. In other words, the impact of 174, if treated intelligently, is the time value of money until steady state is reached for the engineering costs incurred to remove uncertainty.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.174-2
by layer8 | 2025-06-09 16:49:09+00:00
The compiler analogy doesn’t quite fit, because the essential difference is that source code is (mostly) deterministic and thus can be reasoned about (you can largely predict in detail what behavior code will exhibit even before writing it), which isn’t the case for LLM instructions. That’s a major factor why many developers don’t like AI coding, because every prompt becomes a non-reproducible, literally un-reasonable experiment.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-06-09 16:49:20+00:00
AI progress has also made high quality language translation a lot cheaper. When I started https://nuenki.app last year, the options were exorbitantly priced DeepL for decent quality low latency translation or Sonnet for slightly cheaper, much slower, but higher quality translation.

Now, just a year later, DeepL is beaten by open models served by https://groq.com for most languages, and Claude 4 / GPT-4.1 / my hybrid LLM translator (https://nuenki.app/translator) produce practically perfect translations.

LLMs are also better at critiquing translations than producing them, but pre-thinking doesn't help at all, which is just fascinating. Anyway, it's a really cool topic that I'll happily talk at length about! They've made so much possible. There's a blog on the website, if anyone's curious.
by codeptualize | 2025-06-09 16:49:31+00:00
Whisper large v3 from openai, but we host it ourselves on Modal.com. It's easy, fast, no rate limits, and cheap as well.

If you want to run it locally, I'd still go with whisper, then I'd look at something like whisper.cpp https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp. Runs quite well.
by Propelloni | 2025-06-09 16:49:40+00:00
Me neither, but as the discussers point out, the Weimar Republic totally failed to apply serious consquences, e.g. Hitler's very short arrest after the Munich coup. Besides, the safeguards include more than limiting free speech.

Of course, those safeguards were designed in the late 1940s, so it's interesting, to say the least, how they cope with modern demagoguery. In any case it is worth a try.

Tangentially, that's a great site! I hadn't heard of FIRE before, but I'm glad they exist. I hope they don't get suborned by one side or the other.
by amluto | 2025-06-09 16:50:06+00:00
I’m not convinced that passivating a titanium cup would have much if any effect. Chemicals like citric acid remove iron, and there shouldn’t by any appreciable amount of iron on the surface to begin with. I also don’t know whether the undesired (to me) green tea reaction is with titanium metal or with titanium dioxide.

It could be interesting to experiment with anodized titanium. Apparently, one can fairly easily build up moderately thick oxide layers with various properties.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-06-09 16:50:12+00:00
Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, just vaguely interested.

My understanding is that previously, software dev salaries would be counted as a business expense in the year they are paid. Now they are amortized over X years on the tax paperwork. As a result, a lot of software companies suddenly show relatively high income, and have a large increase in their tax burden. This is especially hard for startups that were “on the edge” of making it. If the salaries go back to being an expense in the year the salary is paid, the tax burden will decrease again, because apparent company income will be less.
by credit_guy | 2025-06-09 16:50:21+00:00
> Would you help someone do something which you think is bad?

I wouldn’t. But this is not the question here. The question here is if I would give someone a powerful tool that can be used for good, for neutral or for bad things, if I believe that there is a good chance it will be used for bad things. That puts a lot of responsibility on me to get into the business of predicting bad behavior.
by hedayet | 2025-06-09 16:50:30+00:00
That claim actually gives me pause. It reminds me of an idea from Zero to One by Peter Thiel - that real monopolies like to appear as a small fish in a very big pond, while tiny players try to appear as a monopoly.

So when I see a company bragging about "500% profitability," I can’t help but wonder if they’re even profitable at all.
by RankingMember | 2025-06-09 16:51:16+00:00
If God is truly good and omniscient, why would he intentionally create imperfect beings with the capacity for evil and then judge them for being imperfect? It's hard to see this story as one of some being of pure goodness instead of, rather, a character more akin to Jigsaw, trapping his creations in paradoxical or impossible situations for some unknown pleasure.

Maybe we just have drastically different ideas of what "love" is.
by SantalBlush | 2025-06-09 16:51:18+00:00
Comment one: "It bothers me a great deal as an American to see this anti-authoritarian thread of American identity...."

Comment two: "When Americans were “resisting authority” by not wearing masks... did you feel the same pride in anti-authority behavior then?"

Comment three: "Anybody get tear-gassed for not wearing a mask?"

Comment four: "Yes.... In Australia"
by thegrim33 | 2025-06-09 16:51:23+00:00
I recently built a media player for my custom render engine, using FFMPEG, and boy did I run into a lot of these.

I thought, "how hard could it be?". Just point FFMPEG at a media file and have it work its magic and return to me frames to display and audio to play.

Thousands and thousands of lines of code later, dealing with different clocks and delving into researching PID to figure out how to properly sync audio with video, dealing with multiple layers of async processing, out of order decoding, different codecs, GPU decoding, every edge case imaginable, and so much more, it was one of the most miserable things I've done in a very long time.

Not to mention the FFMPEG project is written in 30 year old style C with virtually zero documentation. It's gone through massive horrible refactors every 5 years and the end result is incredibly fragile and gross. I can't believe such a popular project is in such a horrible state. Multiple times in the process I was on the verge of just dropping what I was doing and devoting the next year of my life to working on a modern replacement for FFMPEG. If anyone wants a project, there's one right there.
by Xmd5a | 2025-06-09 16:51:26+00:00
https://phys.org/news/2014-08-physicists-eye-neural-formula-...

>Their findings, verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals, may have universal applications. "It's a simple mechanism," Nemenman says. "If a system has some hidden variable, and many units, such as 40 or 50 neurons, are adapted and responding to the variable, then Zipf's law will kick in."