MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saratogacx | 2025-06-25 22:13:55+00:00
Explorer around Win98, I think as part of IE4, got the capability of hosting a web page in an explorer window (or part of it anyway for things like showing details) but it wasn't the control used for actually navigating through files. They did try and simulate it by allowing files to be single click to open and giving them blue underlines. MS kept using good ol' list views up through today for most of it. It is in the newer experiences where they're thrashing about and adding galleries, suggestions, and whatever will get someone promoted.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-25 22:14:49+00:00
It's lead.

Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].

Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.

We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...

[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP7932

[3] https://kagi.com/assistant/d2c6fdd5-73dd-4952-ae40-1f36aef1e...
by alganet | 2025-06-25 22:15:16+00:00
The opposite can also be true.

When you and your allies have all the tech, but the enemy still finds cheap and easy ways to make them ineffective (Vietnam War). Makes one question if all the gizmos are worth it, really shakes up the morale.

I was not talking about about a confrontational situation though. Most cults and pseudoscience are just plain scams.
by lupusreal | 2025-06-25 22:16:19+00:00
Best CPU TTS that can run on something like a raspberry pi is Piper. It can do real time synthesis on a raspberry pi and on a real computer it runs several times faster with negligible performance cost. I use it for 'reading' ebooks when my eyes get tired. The quality is roughly on par with where Mac OS's TTS was ~10 years ago (the last time I used it.) You can tell it's TTS, but it's good enough that you can become accustomed to it fairly easily.

https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
by gerdesj | 2025-06-25 22:16:34+00:00
"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way."

I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.
by dang | 2025-06-25 22:16:55+00:00
Related. Others?

Negative 2000 Lines of Code (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483165 - Nov 2022 (167 comments)

-2000 Lines of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387179 - March 2021 (256 comments)

-2000 Lines of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10734815 - Dec 2015 (131 comments)

-2000 lines of code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516671 - April 2014 (139 comments)

-2000 Lines Of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4040082 - May 2012 (34 comments)

-2000 lines of code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545452 - July 2010 (50 comments)

-2000 Lines Of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114223 - Feb 2010 (39 comments)

-2000 Lines Of Code (metrics == bad) (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069066 - Jan 2010 (2 comments)

Note for anyone wondering: reposts are ok after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).In addition to it being fun to revisit perennials sometimes (though not too often), this is also a way for newer cohorts to encounter the classics for the first time—an important function of this site!
by nine_k | 2025-06-25 22:17:20+00:00
The point is in not showing the watching adversary any DNS names at all. You do DoH, you do the IP cert, you enter TLS before naming any names. The www.secret.com is never visible in plaintext.

Only helpful if the IP itself is not incriminating or revealing, that is, it's an IP from a large pool like Cloudflare, GCP, AWS, etc.

To my mind, it's much more interesting to verify that an address like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 is what it purports to be, but running UDP DNS over TLS is still likely not practical, and DoH already exists, so I don't see how helpful is it here.
by rhet0rica | 2025-06-25 22:18:28+00:00
Oh, that horrible Electron UI. Under Windows it pegs a core on my CPU at all times!

If you're just working as a single user via the OpenAI protocol, you might want to consider koboldcpp. It bundles a GUI launcher, then starts in text-only mode. You can also tell it to just run a saved configuration, bypassing the GUI; I've successfully run it as a system service on Windows using nssm.

https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases

Though there are a lot of roleplay-centric gimmicks in its feature set, its context-shifting feature is singular. It caches the intermediate state used by your last query, extending it to build the next one. As a result you save on generation time with large contexts, and also any conversation that has been pushed out of the context window still indirectly influences the current exchange.
Show HN: I built a tool to save and manage AI prompts on my local device
by ankit21j | 2025-06-25 22:18:41+00:00
I like most engineers these days, use Cursor, Claude Code and ChatGpt pretty much every day. And when I thought a prompt was good, I would usually save it to my Notion template, often creating templates. I know a lot of people might suggest using rules in cursor or mdc's, but that just became bloated for me.

I love making CLI tools, and while going through this, I thought it would be a cool idea to build a CLI tool to save and manage prompts, all locally so that my data is with me. This resulted in me building PromptForge.

It might seem pretty useless to some, but I thought it would be a nice thing to share if it helps others in their day to day use.

You can find the link to the public installer at: https://github.com/aki21j/promptforge-releases/releases/late... Guide to use it is also available in the same repo.
by amluto | 2025-06-25 22:18:47+00:00
Every now and then, in between reasonable and almost-reasonable suggestions, Copilot will suggest a pile of code, stylistically consistent with the function I’m editing, the extends clear off the bottom of the page. I haven’t been inspired to hit tab a couple times and try to reverse engineer the resulting vomit of code, but I can easily imagine a new programmer accepting the code because AI! or, perhaps worse, hitting tab without even noticing.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-25 22:19:27+00:00
^ This. The drug war was an attempt for conservatives to punish poor people for using a harmless drug (marijuana) to help cope with systemic inequality, and kids for wanting to have fun.

From 1950-1970, America introduced new mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana. First-time offenses carried a minimum of 2-10 yrs in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. They repealed these minimums in 1970 because it did jack shit to stop people smoking. The govt even recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1970, but Nixon rejected it.

But then came The Parents. As fucking usual, parents "concerned for their children" began a years-long lobbying and marketing effort to convince the public any kind of drug was evil and harming kids. Through the 1980s their lobbying spread to all corners of the government, influencing messaging and policy. So finally in 1986, Reagan introduced new mandatory minimums for marijuana, based on amount. Having 100 marijuana plants was the same crime as 100 grams of heroin. And then they went further; if you we caught with marijuana three times, you got a life sentence. Life. For pot. In 1989, Bush Sr. officially declared the "new" War on Drugs. And we've all been paying for it ever since.
by gizmo686 | 2025-06-25 22:19:29+00:00
A decent part of my job is open source. Our reason for doing it is simple: we would rather have people who are not us do the work instead of us.

On some of our projects this has been a great success. We have some strong outside contributors doing work on our project without us needing to pay them. In some cases, those contributors are from companies that are in direct competition with us.

On other projects we've open sourced, we've had people (including competitors) use, without anyone contributing back.

Guess which projects stay open source.
by renhanxue | 2025-06-25 22:20:18+00:00
Astrophysicist Angela Collier's video essay "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" [0] is a good introduction. Her accounts of her own encounters with "Feynman bros" are heart-wrenching.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
by wvenable | 2025-06-25 22:20:37+00:00
I was “getting out there” too! So many major life milestones. But actually it has never stopped. Most of my major career changes happened after the second child. I have entirely new interests now.

I feel like I do have the unique perspective having actually done both. I don't need to assume what kind of parent I was in my 20s because I was that parent. And I'm a different parent now. But being a younger parent was a great experience despite any other consequences.
by pfdietz | 2025-06-25 22:20:52+00:00
> With chemical rockets, not much.

The energy involved in chemical rocketry is actually not that much. Getting a kilogram to LEO is roughly as expensive (in energy) as flying it to the other side of the world in an airliner. Getting stuff back from an earth-crossing asteroid can also be very cheap energetically, with very small delta-V (if one is willing to wait long enough).
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-25 22:21:14+00:00
> I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously

> I am also a bit of a dick

With an attitude like this, you realize you're part of the male loneliness problem, right?

How many times do people show up to your clubs and organizations one time and then never show up again?

Think on it

A big part of the "male loneliness epidemic" is that a lot of men are huge assholes for no reason
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-25 22:21:24+00:00
You can want to be helpful without wanting to have power or responsibility.

I'm interested in people (not companies, or at least I don't care about companies) being able to read, reference, learn from, or improve the open source software that I write. It's there if folks want it. I basically never promote it, and as such, it has little uptake. It's still useful though, and I use it, and some friends use it. Hooray. But that's all.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-25 22:21:36+00:00
You're thinking about the wrong stage of friendmaking.

The pitch here is for getting people over the first hurdle, which is being at the same place at the same time as other people, and to some extent, the second hurdle, which is striking up a conversation (as anyone who would attend something like this is, by their presence, signalling an interest in at least casual interaction with the other participants). This adds people to your "acquaintances" list.

The next step is forming setting specific friendships. Your gym buddies, your work friends, etc. Then you need to actually invite some of those friends to other settings, until your friendship isn't entirely predicated on the particular setting. Then you need to spend enough time with that person to maintain the friendship.

For most people, the big hurdles are the "being present", "striking up a conversation", and "converting setting specific friendships into general friendships" steps. Everything else is pretty straightforward.

Casually dropping by someone's place unscheduled is typically reserved for pretty close friends. That's not what this service is targeting.
by alach11 | 2025-06-25 22:21:47+00:00
This is starting to encroach on Lovable, right? I do suspect the effect of these "vibe coded" apps on the SaaS market will be smaller than expected. Heavier-featured apps will have all sorts of functionality and polish a user won't even think to ask Claude to build. And the amount of effort to describe everything you need an app to do is higher than it seems.

Instead, I think this is going to open a new paradigm with an immense long-tail of hyper-niche fit-for-purpose business applications. There's so much small-scale work that happens in corporations that isn't common enough to be worth building a product to solve. But it's still a big time-saving to the departments/users if they can improve the process with a vibe-coded app!
by hobofan | 2025-06-25 22:22:54+00:00
Hmm, maybe. Though, IIRC rye and uv were more parallel developments rather than uv's lineage tracing back to rye. Also at the point mitsuhiko created rye, he had handed off maintenance of Flask for ~8 years already and was arguably more associated with efforts in the Rust community than in Python.

However, in both cases (uv and rye) it took someone with a Rust background to build something to actually shake up the status quo. With the core PyPa people mostly building on incremental improvements in pip, and Poetry essentially ignoring most PEP effort, things weren't really going to go anywhere.
by johnisgood | 2025-06-25 22:23:47+00:00
FYI:

[johnisgood@arch regex]$ hyperfine 'perl regex_test.pl' 'python3 regex_test.py' Benchmark 1: perl regex_test.pl Time (mean ± σ): 1.807 s ± 0.028 s [User: 1.752 s, System: 0.054 s] Range (min … max): 1.780 s … 1.857 s 10 runs Benchmark 2: python3 regex_test.py Time (mean ± σ): 3.316 s ± 0.230 s [User: 3.246 s, System: 0.069 s] Range (min … max): 3.052 s … 3.858 s 10 runs Summary perl regex_test.pl ran 1.84 ± 0.13 times faster than python3 regex_test.py

This is for a very simple script!

You know why?

Because Perl was practically designed for text processing and regex.

It has:

- A regex engine that's deeply integrated and highly optimized.

- Less overhead (no interpreter startup, minimal memory structures).

- Simpler string substitution and less abstraction.

Seriously, it is not a matter of opinion.

I hope you are convinced now.

In case you are not, let me know, I will let you in on a lot of great details. :)
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-25 22:25:49+00:00
IMHO, at least the foundations of what makes the Internet tick - the Linux kernel, but also stuff like SSL libraries, format parsers, virtualization tooling and the standard libraries and tools that come installed by default on Linux systems - should be funded by taxpayers. The EU budget for farm subsidies is about 40 billion euros a year - cut 1% off of it, so 400 million euros, and invest it into the core of open source software, and we'd get an untold amount of progress in return.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-25 22:26:31+00:00
Same as a shopping centre, clothing retailer, or any other non-bazaar marketplace with its own brand and transaction processing.

Apple is selling you a huge lucrative market.

Customers buy Apple’s curated marketplace.

Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.

Believe me, I would never pay for most of the apps that I did pay for via Apple if it wasn’t via their marketplace and their consumer protections.

There is no counterfactual scenario where you and millions(!) of other ISVs get 100% of the same money without Apple.

What’s difficult to understand about these business relationships?
by imiric | 2025-06-25 22:27:34+00:00
This is great. We need more research into solving this fundamental problem, yet AI companies prefer to chase benchmarks and pump out value-added products.

The RAG-based mitigation is interesting, but quite limited, as mentioned. It would only work if the user can provide ground truth data, which for code generation is relatively straightforward, but it's much more difficult for most other factual information. We can't directly rely on data from the web, since the sources need to be carefully reviewed by a human first, which is the labor-intensive task that requires human domain experts.

So this approach seems like a band-aid, and wouldn't be generally applicable. I'm not in the AI industry, but from the perspective of a user it seems that the hallucination problem requires a much more foundational solution.
by baby_souffle | 2025-06-25 22:28:42+00:00
This has to put them in the top 0.01% of companies that make consumer electronics.

I can think of only a few companies that bother to publish any details... And most of them are focused on industrial customers where it isn't unreasonable to need certain protocol details for integration or even just compliance with certain regulatory systems.

Maybe things are changing?

I have noticed that some of the LED light controllers you see on AliExpress are leaning in to open firmware standards. 5 years ago, you bought the controller and had to flash your own firmware. Now, there's an option at checkout to select an open source firmware. Some even have a USB port built in for flashing!
Ask HN: What makes an engineering blog great?
by andrewstetsenko | 2025-06-25 22:29:00+00:00
According to Stack Overflow’s annual surveys, about 1 in 3 developers say that company-owned content — like engineering blogs — is one of their top three ways of discovering potential employers (alongside personal networks and company reviews).

That got me thinking about what actually makes a great engineering blog. Here are a few patterns I’ve noticed — curious to hear what others think:

1. Transparency draws talent. The best engineering blogs don’t just explain what the company is working on — they offer a candid view into real challenges, trade-offs, and how the team thinks. For folks considering joining, this can be a signal of technical depth and culture.

2. Credit where it’s due. Companies like Netflix do this well — not just sharing the technical content, but also spotlighting individual contributors. That kind of recognition builds internal morale and shows the outside world the caliber of people behind the work.

3. Distribution matters. A good post can go unnoticed without internal buy-in. When engineers share their own writing (or each other’s), it creates a loop: more reach, more recognition, more reputational lift for the company.

4. The Medium migration. A few years back, Medium was the default blogging platform for tech orgs. Lately, there’s been a quiet shift back to company-owned domains — probably for better SEO, more control over analytics, and long-term ownership.

5. Substack? Not (yet) mainstream. I expected Substack might fill the gap — but very few engineering blogs seem to be using it. A couple examples like PostHog and Jam.dev stand out, but it’s not widely adopted. Curious if anyone else has thoughts or examples.

6. Write for devs. Engineering content that gains traction tends to teach something — not just showcase your stack. Code snippets, TL;DR summaries, actionable insights — these resonate more than generic case studies or product updates.

One trick I’ve seen work well: test draft blog posts here on Hacker News to get early feedback. It’s a fast way to validate whether the content is actually interesting to the broader dev community.

Would love to hear: - Which engineering blogs do you personally follow or recommend? - What makes one stand out to you?
by usuallyalurker | 2025-06-25 22:29:17+00:00
Not only is that comment a false dichotomy (we can both explore space and make humanity more sustainable at the same time), it also presumes that space exploration and sustainability are at odds with one another and not synergistic.

Humans, simply by existing on Earth, have a huge and often negative impact on the environment. If we could somehow shift the human population off Earth, either by terraforming planets (like Mars) or creating artificial space habitats, it would have a huge positive impact on Earth's environment. We don't currently have the technology to do so - we would need space elevators to feasibly move humanity off Earth - but that doesn't mean we should move our attention away from space in the meantime.
by jacekm | 2025-06-25 22:30:18+00:00
Thank you for the examples. I tried the one with a pink cake. Turns out that on my machine only web browsers are capable of displaying the image properly. All viewers (IrfanView, XnView, Nomacs, Windows Photos) and editors (Paint .NET, GIMP) that I've tried only showed the "washed out" picture.
by const_cast | 2025-06-25 22:30:55+00:00
Just intuitively, periods of high corporate tax rates in the US were accompanied by significantly greater purchasing power for laborers. Obviously it's a little hard to tell if that is the cause, since post-WWII America was an entirely different beast, but I think high corporate tax is really not the end of the world.

Regardless, we got rid of almost all corporate tax, and did that really trickle down to average laborers? Er, no, I think decidedly so.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-25 22:32:07+00:00
Value of repairability depends on how often things break and how accessible shops are. In my case it’s pretty unusual, and I’m not often far from an Apple store.

It also depends on how much one values the qualities inherent to laptops. To me, a battery that burns through quickly is a major ding to its portability and extra overhead (needing to find outlets to sit near, having to carry a quick charging brick, etc) that I’d rather not deal with.

I think there’s probably a happy medium to be found in this situation. Power consumption could be reduced by switching RAM away from DIMM slots and over to CAMM, allowing usage of efficient LPDDR modules for example, and they could also offer an ultra-low-power soldered RAM mainboard option for those willing to trade off a little bit of repairability for battery life (I’d bet most people will never bump up their RAM before upgrading their mainboard anyway).

Whatever the case, repairability is something I value, but not so much that it overrules all the other qualities that make a laptop good. It’s one aspect of many.
by nordsieck | 2025-06-25 22:32:55+00:00
> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.

The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform.

If 95% of gamers ran MacOS instead of Windows, you'd see a very different tech stack among game developers.
by robinhouston | 2025-06-25 22:32:56+00:00
It sounds as though you're talking about the solution to part (b) as given in that reference. Have a look at the solution to part (a) by Michael Goldberg, which I think does prove that a homogeneous tetrahedron must rest stably on at least two of its faces. The proof is short enough to post here in its entirety:

> A tetrahedron is always stable when resting on the face nearest to the center of gravity (C.G.) since it can have no lower potential. The orthogonal projection of the C.G. onto this base will always lie within this base. Project the apex V to V’ onto this base as well as the edges. Then, the projection of the C.G. will lie within one of the projected triangles or on one of the projected edges. If it lies within a projected triangle, then a perpendicular from the C.G. to the corresponding face will meet within the face making it another stable face. If it lies on a projected edge, then both corresponding faces are stable faces.
by gerdesj | 2025-06-25 22:33:16+00:00
I was going off on a bit of a tangent but take a look at this horror, which is still up:

https://github.com/InboraStudio/Proxmox-VGPU

Note the quite professional looking README.md and think about the audience for this thing - kittens hitting the search bong and trying to get something very complicated working.

Read the scripts: they are pretty short and could put your hypervisor in the hands of someone else who may not be too friendly.

Now pip has the same problem except you don't normally go in with a web browser first.

I raised an issue to at least provide a hint to casual browsers and also raised it with the github AI bottie complaint thang which doesn't care about you, me or anything else for that matter.