MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubefox | 2025-06-12 11:35:43+00:00
LLMs simply take in text and return text, therefore they can just be trained via self-supervised learning on large amounts of text. Then they only need a little fine-tuning on top of that, and they are ready.

But an analogous pretraining approach isn't available for robotics. Robots take in sensory data and return movements, in real-time. There is no large data corpus of this pairing to do self-supervised learning on, like there is for text.

Even if we only consider pure video-to-video models, for which there is a large amount of training data for self-supervised learning, the autoregressive next-token predictor approach wouldn't work. That's why Veo 3 & Co are diffusion models. Because predicting the next frame directly doesn't work. It's far too much data. Text comes in relative tiny, discrete amounts with high useful information content per bit. Video is huge, basically continuous, and has quite low useful information content per bit (because of things like irrelevant details and noise), at least as far as robotics is concerned.

Moreover, even if next frame-prediction would work, this doesn't really do what we want for robotics. The robot doesn't just need a prediction about the next frame (or embedding of the next frame) when planning its movements, but potentially broadly about the next millions of frames, about things that are much further out in the future.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-06-12 11:36:20+00:00
Your premise assumes there are policies and technologies in place that restrict what a developer can do.

This is often the case, although I’ve very rarely seen environments as restrictive as what you describe being enforced on developers.

Typically developer user accounts and assigned devices are in slightly less restrictive policy groupings, or are given access to some kind of remote build/test infrastructure.

Of course companies need the option to control what software is run on their infrastructure. There are an endless stream of reasons and examples for that. Up-thread there’s a great example of what happens when you let folks install Oracle software without guardrails. Businesses are of course larger and more complex than their developers and have needs beyond their developers.

What matters here is implementation and policy management. You want those to be balanced between audience needs and business needs.

It’s also worth mentioning that plenty of developers have no clue what they’re doing with computers outside their particular area of expertise.
by jordz | 2025-06-12 11:37:19+00:00
I work in the industry making hardware and software for large scale commercial and grid scale storage.

There are several challenges with this, safety, thermal runaway, and life cycle of the asset which has a limited amount of cycles.

Also the architecture of the system for the AC inverters and the DC side can come from very different places in the supply chain and aren’t as vertically integrated leaving you in a position where you can’t actually make this work without compromising something in the supply chain. That being said we are talking about a LOT of energy in these systems and to dissipate that much heat you’d need a load bank.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-12 11:38:08+00:00
Van Gogh spent his life failing to sell his artwork. I.e. he was commercially motivated, just failed.

None of your other points are relevant.

People get good at art when they dedicate absolutely obscene amounts of time to it. If you take away all commercial incentive to do so, people won't spend as much time doing that craft.

This is called basic incentives and it applies to artists too.
by brunohaid | 2025-06-12 11:38:27+00:00
Baffling tragedy, again.

Clear skies, no LiveATC but reports of single Mayday call, gear out but no flaps and no control inputs visible in the grainy video. Something has to go really catastrophically wrong with a modern jetliner for that to happen, like the very dense flock of birds in Korea with the 737 a couple of months back.

The very short intersection takeoff seems like a good hint (and terrible practice), but all gears and engines look kinda OK from the outside. If they‘d scraped something on takeoff hard enough to take out both engines, there’d probably be some visible damage, or at least some gears sheared off.

EDIT:

Fully agree with the speculation in light of tragedy comments, but aviation is a bit of a special case. The reason it’s so safe is because an awful lot of people immediately start looking into potential reasons and then spend years getting to the bottom of it. The initial speculation is like an exercise: what could have happened? What if I’m in that situation, and need to act now, without knowing much of anything? If you do that a couple of dozen or hundred times throughout your life, it really builds a foundation for when an actual emergency ever happens to you.

It’s a bit like the reason most flight attendants in the emergency exit jump seat across from you won’t talk with you during the actual takeoff and landing: they‘re mentally walking through a potential emergency and what they‘d then need to do. Every single time. So if it ever happens, there‘s muscle memory, 10000x over.

EDIT 2: see the Flightradar24 comment below, it looks like they did backtrack and use the full runway.
Show HN: Q++ – A Quantum/Classical Programming Language (Open Source)
by oluwaseunfunmi | 2025-06-12 11:38:32+00:00
Q++ is an open-source language designed to bridge classical and quantum computing with a C++-like syntax. It supports quantum memory (qregister), task-level hardware targeting (task<QPU>), and includes a runtime for wavefunction simulation, memory tracking, and scheduling.

Built for experimentation and education, it currently targets a basic IR and includes stubbed backends for Qiskit, Cirq, and others. I’m hoping to evolve this into a modular hybrid stack for future quantum workflows.

Doc: https://github.com/sefunmi4/qpp-lang/blob/main/docs/whitepap... Discord: https://discord.gg/hshnx264 Feedback and contributors welcome.
by mxuribe | 2025-06-12 11:39:03+00:00
I agree that the UI/UX of libreofice is not the prettiest...but its fine for what i need it for: regular work-related document management, word processing sorts of tasks. But my partner? They LOVE libreoffice specifically BECAUSE its looks like older versions of MS Word! Their needs are basic and are easily met with the functionality of libreoffice and onlyoffice...but they prefer libreoffice especially for the look-and-feel. Caveat: we are of a particularly advanced age, hence we recall many decades of the different versions of MS Office and its app offerings. ;-)
by ihuk | 2025-06-12 11:39:33+00:00
Here's a Reddit video: https://www.reddit.com/r/ahmedabad/comments/1l9i1ga/om_shant...

And here's a YouTube video showing a Ram Air Turbine (RAT) being deployed on a 787 for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBCGf50Trc&t=69s
by incomingpain | 2025-06-12 11:40:06+00:00
>but I'm increasingly seeing more ideological posts that are especially not hackerish,

hasnt changed. When you give anonymous people the ability to censor the speech of others, it creates a bad situation that will always enshitify.

People who get censored always leave. The remaining cohort loses more than just that who specific censored subject. Leaving the site a bit shittier and declining.

It's really the design of the site that will result this way.
by phito | 2025-06-12 11:40:18+00:00
If I have to review all code code it's writing, I'd rather write it myself (maybe with the help of an LLM).

> anyway, obviously do whatever you want, but deriding something you've not looked in to isn't a hugely thoughtful process for adapting to a changing world.

I have tried it. Not sure I want to be part of such world, unfortunately.

> the experience is pretty much like being a senior dev with a bunch of very eager juniors who read very fast.

I... don't want that. Juniors just slow me down because I have to check what they did and fix their mistakes.

(this is in the context of professional software development, not making scripts, tinkering etc)
by rwmj | 2025-06-12 11:40:25+00:00
I've been checking in large (10s to 100s MBs) tarballs into one git repo that I use for managing a website archive for a few years, and it can be made to work but it's very painful.

I think there are three main issues:

1. Since it's a distributed VCS, everyone must have a whole copy of the entire repo. But that means anyone cloning the repo or pulling significant commits is going to end up downloading vast amounts of binaries. If you can directly copy the .git dir to the other machine first instead of using git's normal cloning mechanism then it's not as bad, but you're still fundamentally copying everything:

$ du -sh .git 55G .git

2. git doesn't "know" that something is a binary (although it seems to in some circumstances), so some common operations try to search them or operate on them in other ways as if they were text. (I just ran git log -S on that repo and git ran out of memory and crashed, on a machine with 64GB of RAM).

3. The cure for this (git lfs) is worse than the disease. LFS is so bad/strange that I stopped using it and went back to putting the tarballs in git.
by defrost | 2025-06-12 11:41:24+00:00
By that logic, the USA also wants to become like China. The current POTUS, Donald J. Trump declared his admiration for the strong chinese response to the Tiananmen Square protests.

* https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-praised-china-tiananme...

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/11/donald-trump...

( and numerous other reports since his 1990 comments )
by footlose_3815 | 2025-06-12 11:42:15+00:00
I'm curious what Microsoft and Ubuntu's experience is as well, so there's a frame of reference.

I skimmed that list, and Devil's Advocate; It seems like most of that is functional, stuff that they want to update in the background to make sure you have a better experience when you're back?

On the flip, I guess we think Apple is up to something shady? My last understanding was that they were firm they didn't sell user data. Did this change?
Ask HN: Replacing My Pinebook Pro – Recommendations?
by Y_Y | 2025-06-12 11:42:48+00:00
I’m looking to replace my Pinebook Pro (old and failing, Pine64 has moved on) and would appreciate advice from anyone with experience using lightweight, Linux-centric laptops.

My main use is coding. I travel often (backpack only), so weight (no more than 1.5kg), size (12-14 inch screen) and durability are important. ARM is preferable but not required. Budget is ideally under $1200. I’d like good Linux compatibility (specifically Arch or Guix), at least a 1920x1080 resolution, decent touchpad, good Wi-Fi, and a couple of USB-C ports. Battery life can be modest—a few hours is fine.

Openness (Coreboot, modularity, open schematics) is a nice-to-have but not a dealbreaker. I’m open to any tradeoffs in weight, or vendor ideology compared to the Pinebook Pro. Performance-wise I don't need much, the PBP's RK3399.

Laptops I’m currently considering:

MNT Reform

OLIMEX TERES-I

StarLite Mk V

Purism Librem 14

Framework Laptop

Something crazy, like an M1 Macbbok with Asahi?

Would love to hear from anyone using these—or anything else that fits this niche. Interested in real-world experiences, reliability, and any gotchas.
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-12 11:42:52+00:00
License fees for a few thousand workplaces of Microsoft can pay for a lot of development on FOSS alternatives instead. There is very little overhead there.

Some things take a lot of work, but many changes that would be useful are pretty easy to make. Crash and bug and (some) performance fixes, time-saving automations and integrations with rough and / or minimal user interfaces and so on.
by zackify | 2025-06-12 11:43:34+00:00
I’m surprised this post is able to stay up on hackernews.

One time I simply made a post about how a page was simpler to code and understand in Remix.

You may not believe this but I had 3+ chat requests from multiple employees at vercel.

Across multiple social media accounts. All asking to take it down or meet and discuss with them.
by greenavocado | 2025-06-12 11:43:42+00:00
Windows telemetry is way more insane

Small sample of telemetry and spying domains (out of date):

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocke...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocke...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocke...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Strappazzon/teleme7ry/mast...
by strken | 2025-06-12 11:44:02+00:00
A lot of everything has racist origins if you squint hard enough. You can make that argument for everything from chemistry (via alchemy and links to eugenics) to car ownership (via white flight and avoiding racially mixed public transport).

For some reason, it's easier to see the limitations of that approach when it's applied to common everyday things that everyone does, and much harder when it's applied to conspiracy theories.
by jacooper | 2025-06-12 11:45:33+00:00
I truly hate how crappy their processors are, it's insane that their upcoming flagship will have the same performance as a three year old flagship.

you don't need it, it's just a phone. Yeah maybe now, but in two years when the pixel is shitting itself you will understand.

If GrapheneOS dies, that's probably it for me with pixels. The only advantage left is how cheap you can get a new flagship pixel on the gray market.
by npteljes | 2025-06-12 11:45:36+00:00
Honestly, the list looks legit. Computers nowadays are semi-remotely-managed appliances. Internet is presumed, offline is not first, and offline is absolutely not exclusive.

>I have been trying to minimize to the extent possible the reach of big tech into my life.

I don't think this goal is possible, or worthwhile, on a big tech offering like a Mac + macOS. It can certainly be tried, but the user needs to be prepared for unforeseen consequences, and the override of the settings. It is like plugging in the ears to have a quieter life, in the middle of a metropolis. In the end, the context won't change. The direction of the platforms are clear, and the zeitgeist is bigger than all of us. The first option with a real impact is leaving the ecosystem.

Although, blocking some domains could be a good first step towards that. Rome wasn't built in a day.
by simondotau | 2025-06-12 11:45:46+00:00
The way I see it is either you trust Apple or you don’t. To be clear, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to arrive at either conclusion, as it relates to your own needs and security posture.

Personally I choose to trust them. My trust is not blind, and they could lose my trust very quickly. But as it stands right now, they have my trust.

If you say that you don’t trust Apple, I don’t see how you could tolerate running any of their software. Relying on an operating system made by a company I don’t trust seems wildly irresponsible to me.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-06-12 11:46:25+00:00
I suspected this was about a singular case. Any typical pistachio farm doesn’t need anywhere near that kind of water.

Here we’d be talking about “the corporate name” in pistachios. That’s a very different thing from what “a” typical pistachio farmer needs. I submit the original comment is cherry-picking to make their argument.

A pistachio tree needs something like (on average) 60 gallons of water a day.

For one 365-day year that is 21,900 gallons/tree/year.

That’s a lot of water, of course. But most farms do not have in excess of 5.39 million pistachio trees (using the 130 billion gallon number).
by sybercecurity | 2025-06-12 11:46:28+00:00
My initial thought as well. May be overly chatty, but there may be a good intention behind it like "system seems to be idle for a while, now would be a good time to check for updates"

I'd wager Windows does something similar. Linux distros may do it, but also may not since they may not be obsessed with happy eyeball problems and user perception of speed/latency.
by K0balt | 2025-06-12 11:46:29+00:00
Ah, yes, the candyland dismissal. Classic obfuscation through infantilisation. Spooky23 indeed. Next thing , you’re probably going to claim you weren’t involved in the great Canadian genocide of 2013. Or even more damning, claim that such an event never happened at all!

I wasn’t being serious, but I can see how someone might think I was.
Show HN: I'm building an app to replace Overleaf and Notion
by WolfOliver | 2025-06-12 11:47:47+00:00
Hi HN,

Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently.

As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time.

The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.).

A few highlights:

- It uses a custom-built block editor that performs well with large documents. Each block is its own contenteditable element (instead of having one massive contenteditable for the whole document)

- If you prefer plain text - you can insert a Markdown block and write using Markdown instead

- Built-in citation management

- Support for cross-references and footnotes

- Mermaid diagrams, inline LaTeX equations, and display math are all supported

- "To-do" sections help you stay organized while writing

You can try it out here: https://www.monsterwriter.com/
by xattt | 2025-06-12 11:48:37+00:00
A shoe-fitting fluoroscope! I’m only half-joking, but one using terahertz radiation would be very handy to have while shoe-shopping with children.

Kids can’t reliably tell you the fit of their shoes, and some footwear doesn’t yield to the “thumb-at-toe” test.

(1) https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/when-xrays-were-all-the-rage-a...
by mellow_observer | 2025-06-12 11:48:42+00:00
A world where individuals are incentivized to use some wasted space to place low maintenance automated trading batteries to make a little money on the side seems like it'd be an interesting solution to the renewable energy storage problem. Put a few units in otherwise useless locations like on roofs or in between highways and make some cash, sounds like a decent investment.

Would there be any expected problems in doing such distributed power storage on a very large scale around the grid that you'd have to account for? Perhaps issues with synchronization, power flow or the possibility of large scale drops in avaialble stored power at times?
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-12 11:48:52+00:00
I understand what you mean lol, I don't even consider myself a christian anymore but i still feel this weird sectarian loyalty to the protestants. I guess I still admire Martin Luther because I see the concept of the priesthood not claiming to be a representative of God as a necessary pre-requisite for secularism; not that I think that the early protestants deserve credit for that (it obviously wasn't their intention and many of them probably would have run back to catholicism if they knew what this would lead to) but must of the populace in secular countries is still religious to some degree and it's hard to convince them to separate the church from the state when the church is literally a proxy for God almighty.

Of course, I'm also well-aware that there's plenty of latitude to disagree with and even criticize the pope (eg, JD Vance) but my understanding is that came about gradually in the centuries after the protestant reformation as the two groups became less antagonistic towards each other and both sides became more open to adopting beliefs and philosophies from each other.
by brunohaid | 2025-06-12 11:49:03+00:00
„Runway behind you“ is drilled into your head as one of the useless things in aviation. You always want to make sure to use the most runway available to you, exactly for cases when something happens. Hypothetical in this case: you realize something’s wrong with the plane, but you’re already too fast and close to the end of the runway to reject the takeoff because you wouldn’t be able to stop in time anymore.

Large airports with heavy traffic sometimes have operational constraints to send a plane out ahead of another from some intersection, but if the ADSB data is correct, taking off from half the available runway in a fully loaded 787 isn’t a good idea. You just give up a ton of margin for errors.
by lazide | 2025-06-12 11:49:09+00:00
Smart People with money are willing to give it to people if they can make them more money.

Why would anyone give them money if they were just going to throw up their hands and go ‘well, nothing we can do I guess!’.

There is of course the risk that the money gets burned instead of more money getting made, which is the risk in risk/reward.

Rent seeking type behavior tends to happen when there are no obvious ‘green field’ type endeavors to invest in. Or when risk appetites are trending negative.

Note - many of those people with money that want to use it to make more money are retirees, pension funds, etc.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-06-12 11:49:55+00:00
Serious response: COMAC, the "Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China" (1) are working on it, but the competitor C929 aircraft (2) is not expected before 2030.

And they have produced smaller aircraft (3), but but the numbers produced so far are not impressive.

In other words, you're correct that it's not "if" but "when". And that it's a hard task, but they are working on it. The Jet engines seem to be the major hurdle.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C929

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
by al_borland | 2025-06-12 11:50:35+00:00
While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait for data to load when the app launches.

I'm sure some fat can be trimmed, and it may not all be user-centric, but a lot of this had to do with the expectations users have these days with the data being always up to date, instantly available, and proactive about alerting them to things they may want to know about, like rain coming to your area in 30 minutes.

One of my big pet peeves is when I pick up my phone in the morning, go to open an app, and it starts updating, so I need to wait for the download/install. It just had 8 hours on a charger to do that, and instead it seems to wait until it's taken off the charger and unlocked. With auto-updates on, I'd much rather this happen when placed on the charger and inactive, than actively in use and off the charger. The same can be said for a lot of things on the desktop.

This ends up mostly being a question of transparency and user control. Which then becomes a question of how much time/money to they invest in features for 1% of users? Now how much time do they invest in those same features when the 99% will stumble in there, turn a bunch of stuff off, then call support and ask why their weather widget isn't updating?
by blindgeek | 2025-06-12 11:50:38+00:00
Inappropriate / unkind, perhaps. I did make at least one solid friend over it. She saw the post on here, emailed me, and I ended up talking for over an hour with an understanding person who has lots in common with me and gave me some things to think about. I could have done without the email from someone else who said that "people in Gaza are suffering worse than you and they aren't doing what you're doing, so get mental help."

The absurdist humor of my impending demise making the front page of hackernews and being debated by the denizens thereof is not lost on me.