MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuelled6532 | 2025-06-09 16:51:39+00:00
Perhaps I misread. I took your comment to imply that the dewatering pumps were used to fill the canals, thus providing transportation infrastructure.

My original comment was in response to the statement that improved locomotion was an obvious consequence of the steam engine.

I contend that is was not obvious. The first walking beam engines were more like buildings, built in place (largely of masonry) and not portable at all.

The steam engine certainly revolutionized transportation, however I doubt that Newcomen or even Watt looked at their work and thought "this is going to change shipping forever".

Like I said, it took a generation to get to revolving shaft, and then another to get to revolution.

Today is probably like that with regard to AI. The pace of change is much faster now, but we still have no idea what the world will be like after this tech matures.
by kps | 2025-06-09 16:51:43+00:00
The literal computers at the time were people.

Computer: 1. One who computes; a calculator, reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc. [OED, 1923]

Punch cards held tables of records, and the unit record equipment were nowhere close to the modern meaning of ‘computer’. (The human computers were probably Turing-complete, though.)
Show HN: I made a 3D networked open world automation game with no game engine
by weatherfused | 2025-06-09 16:52:51+00:00
Over the last 4 years I've been developing Skyformer, including making all the art. Technical features include:

- OpenGL for graphics, OpenAL for sound, GLFW for input

- Terrain rendered using techniques inspired by REDengine 3 with a custom terrain/world editor.

- Networking framework for co-op with TCP + custom binary protocol

- Immediate mode UI framework, SDF text rendering

- Cascaded shadow mapping with soft shadows.

- Weather simulation (with my own fake physics)

- Dynamic skydome

- Water based on Gerstner waves

- Swept-sphere collision detection and response

- Soft-particles / transparency

- God rays

- Grass rendering

- FXAA, SSAO, Bloom

- etc.

You can ask me anything and let me know if you have any feedback. Thanks!
by libraryatnight | 2025-06-09 16:53:15+00:00
I did Weight Watchers once when I was young. It didn't stick at the time, but it did give me a great deal of perspective that lead to healthy eating and exercise habits that did stick. I worked at Barnes & Noble then, and coming in and realizing that a grande frappuccino wasn't just 'unhealthy' it was all the points. I started reading labels.

Ultimately what worked is what you say, "educating...better decisions" Every diet I tried I concluded the secret sauce was just doing what I already knew - stop eating so much crap and move around more. It was hard yet liberating to get to a point where I wasn't on a diet I was just consciously choosing salads over fries, passing on desert, and not buying junk food so I just don't have it when the compulsion hits. (ADHD meds helped with compulsions, so it wasn't all iron will)

It was like getting sober in a way. I knew, but I also had to want to stop.
by Firfi | 2025-06-09 16:53:25+00:00
That's one of my biggest frustrations - I wasted a lot of time on reprompting. I was making myself stick to 100% LLM approach for a while, in order to learn.

I can't say for everyone, but for me it's hit-and-miss: if LLM starts with "Oh, sorry, you're right" that's a STRONG signal I have to take over right now or rethink the approach, or I get into the doom spiral of reprompting and waste half a day on something I could've done myself by that point, with only difference that after half a day with a coding agent I discovered no important domain or technical knowledge.

So, "how much" to me depends so very much on seemingly random factors, including the time of the day when Antropic decides to serve their quantised version instead of a normal one. On non-random too, like how difficult the domain area is, how well you described it in the prompt, and how well you crafted your system queries. And I hate it very much! At this point, I'm trigger-happy to take over the control and write the stuff that LLM can't in the "controlling package" and tell it to use it as an example / safety check.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-06-09 16:53:53+00:00
Censoring is a lesser crime than murdering - the blood on the hands of the US, Israel and India far exceeds that of any so-called authoritarians.

It's US, not China that operates the world's largest prison system - you should ask prisoners if they rather be free subjects of an authoritarian regime or prisoners with due process in a democracy.
by const_cast | 2025-06-09 16:54:06+00:00
> With an attitude like that it'll never be ready for adoption.

An attitude like what? That I... don't like nvidia because they've been actively hostile to OSS for decades? What the fuck do you want me to do about that? It's nvidia's software - if they want to be jackasses then that's not something I, or anyone else on Earth, can fix.

Also what I said about nvidia is 100% factually true.

Nvidia makes good hardware... at the very top end only. Only. Every other price point, they are objectively the worst option. They offer lower rasterization performance and usually it's not even that close.
by quickthrowman | 2025-06-09 16:54:09+00:00
Well, her specific problem is she was a billionaire but isn’t one now so she’ll say damn near anything to regain that third comma. Nothing more than greed. Match just keeps Bumble around to avoid antitrust legislation, similar to Google and Mozilla’s position.

Edit: It’s not that wild of an idea anyways, there’s a good black mirror episode about it.
by KerrAvon | 2025-06-09 16:54:15+00:00
I'm going to preface this by saying that I support broad liberalization of border controls; immigrants are the backbone of the USA, the engine on which we run, and we should encourage immigration and make it easy for immigrants to settle here. We have the space and resources; anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you for political gain.

So, that said: H-1B shouldn't exist for software. The point of it is to fill jobs that cannot be filled by an American for some reason; a condition that doesn't exist in software development. Hire immigrants as software engineers, fine. But find a way to do it that isn't bullshit.
by oxguy3 | 2025-06-09 16:54:23+00:00
Google Reader used Google accounts for authentication, so an exploit in Reader could potentially be compromising to your entire Google account. This very article gives an example of that; Looker Studio was used to reveal the name on any account, even though most accounts have likely never used Looker Studio.

Google could mitigate this by not having universally shared accounts across all services, but they're not going to do that because most users would find that inconvenient.
by mjr00 | 2025-06-09 16:54:33+00:00
> 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).

Who or what is clamoring for that AI-generated padding which turns 200 words of bullet points into 2000 words of prose, though? It's not like there's suddenly going to be 10x more insight, it's just 10x more slop to slog through that dilutes whatever points the writer had.

If you have 200 words' worth of thoughts you want to share... you can just write 200 words.
by blueflow | 2025-06-09 16:55:25+00:00
You were projecting hard in your last two comments - i generally do not think by constructed group identity. And i'm lost what parts of my wishes you consider authoritarian. I'm just pissed that instance admins install blocks that leave me unable to make my own decisions who i want to interact with - blocking people i like on my behalf.

Typical scenario is that someone gives me their fedi ident and i can't follow them because either my instance blocked theirs or theirs blocked mine.

Ideally i'd have a tool that knows all fedi blocks, where i can specify the people i want to follow and it tells me on what instance i need to register to be able to do that.
by roryirvine | 2025-06-09 16:55:26+00:00
It was actually Ursula von der Leyen who was first, arriving in Kyiv the day before Johnson's visit (neither of them were aware of the other's travel plans, for security reasons).

It is fair to say that Boris did end up forming a particularly strong bond with Zelenskyy, though if you wanted to be cynical you might perhaps point out that two of his three subsequent visits to Kyiv coincided with some of the trickiest moments in the Partygate scandal, and allowed him to get out of events that would likely have proven embarrassing for him.
by swyx | 2025-06-09 16:55:27+00:00
> Just to be clear, I note an absence of concern for cost and carbon in these conversations. Which is unacceptable. But let’s move on.

hold on, its very simple. here's a oneliner even degrowthers would love: extra humans cost a lot more in money and carbon than it cost to have an llm spin up and down to do this work that would otherwise not get done.
by wittjeff | 2025-06-09 16:56:13+00:00
Just this week I was working on something similar but specifically for users who have disabilities, so they can more easily report issues to site owners. I also combined general annotation capability so other users (of my browser extension) can read their comments. And also compatibility with Hypothesis (https://github.com/hypothesis, https://hypothes.is), also using the W3C Web Annotation spec. I hadn't thought of the drag-and-drop bug metaphor; I like it. I had also considered recording mouse and keystroke events up until the time that the bug is marked, and then bundling those events (sanitized) with the bug report for more precise repro steps, but of course that's a bigger ask for the opt-in.
by runako | 2025-06-09 16:56:14+00:00
> other white collar work

Some examples of white collar work that builds long-lived assets but where the work isn't required to be amortized over long periods of time:

- marketing collateral development, unless it is done by engineers

- development of standard legal documents like contracts

- development of HR policy

- development of financial processes & associated reporting, unless done by engineers

- art development (e.g. for packaging and other collateral)

- building customer lists, unless it is done through software by engineers

- developing service offerings (e.g. Costco membership)

Software is not fundamentally different than any of these other white-collar assets that are used to build companies, except that it typically requires more ongoing maintenance.
by duxup | 2025-06-09 16:56:21+00:00
This is less on that specific topic and more general: While I enjoy the hacker news forums a great deal, I've no relationship with YC as an org. I am not sure that YC has any particular interest in things that might impact me as an individual contributor in an org as much as it impacts them.

Understandably there's an everyone for themselves aspect here, but that makes these kinds of call to actions a bit hollow to me.
by toomim | 2025-06-09 16:56:50+00:00
Proft = income - expense.

When you pay people to get work done for a business, that paid work is an expense.

You can deduct expenses from your income to calculate your profits.

IIRC the problem is that software development is not being classified as an operating expense, now, but rather a "research" capital expense, and the deductions then have to be amortized over a number of years.
by zdragnar | 2025-06-09 16:56:53+00:00
In any other company, employee salaries are counted as an operating expense against revenue, much like raw materials, utility bills, etc.

If you sell $100 of goods and you have $100 of expenses, you have $0 net income and owe no taxes as a company- you've made no money!

Because software salaries are counted as research and development, and 174 forces you to amortize the expense over five years, you are now in a much harder position:

You sell $100 worth of software and have $100 of developer salaries. You haven't made any money, and you have $0 in your bank account. The government compels you to not expense more than $20 of those salaries, and taxes the remaining $80 of revenue. You are now bankrupt.
by dang | 2025-06-09 16:56:55+00:00
pg used to do it semi-regularly, especially on internet freedom isssues (edit: and software patents, IIRC), so arguably this is getting back to HN's roots.

I remember he did an anti-SOPA thing on HN which involved some kind of banner at the top of the frontpage. It's probably saved at archive.org somewhere.
by EPWN3D | 2025-06-09 16:57:22+00:00
Having kids does ruin your life. But it also makes you realize that that life was worth ruining. I miss having loads of idle time, hanging out with friends every weekend, etc. I also miss the basically complete financial security I had before having to support a family as a sole earner, and eventually I realized I needed medication to cope with the anxiety it was causing.

But my son is awesome, and there's absolutely no way I'd trade him back for any of that.
by KittenInABox | 2025-06-09 16:57:29+00:00
Couldn't you just spin up your own instance that only consists of yourself in that case? I'm not being facetious I'm genuinely baffled as I thought this kind of custom plug-and-do-yourself-if-you-dont-like-it is fundamental to how fediverse works and is considered a "perk" of it.
by timr | 2025-06-09 16:57:32+00:00
> I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the market" will somehow do something to address climate change? By what mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that?

No, I'm suggesting that the market will take care of the cost/benefit equation, and that the externalities are part of the costs. We could always do a better job of making sure that costs capture these externalities, but that's not the same thing as what the author seems to be saying.

(Also I'm saying that we need to get on with nuclear already, but that's a secondary point.)

> The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant amounts of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a global increase in ecological destruction and carbon emissions.

They no more "require" this, than operating an electric car "requires" the same thing. While there may be environmental extremists who advocate for a wholesale elimination of cars, most sane people would be happy for the balance between cost and benfit represented by electric cars. Ergo, a similar balance must exist for LLMs.
by jgalt212 | 2025-06-09 16:57:53+00:00
As a business owner, I've been adversely impacted by this. I still can't wrap my head around how this is legal or sustainable. If I buy $1MM of plant and equipment, I may not be able to expense it all in year 1, but I can relatively easily get a loan to finance the purchase of such--and manage my cashflows. The same is not for devs. I cannot easily get a loan for $1MM in dev salaries. In my own case, I don't need the loan to pay the salaries. I need the loan to pay the taxes for the portion of the salaries I cannot deduct as an expense. It's just insane.
by ithkuil | 2025-06-09 16:58:06+00:00
I personally don't care about ukraine nor ukrainians; I have no stake in the game.

But I think all humans are fundamentally the same and when I see a bunch of humans fighting for their freedom I can understand them. I understand their motivations.

I also understand the imperialistic motivations. I understand russian need for status and pride and their relationship with their grandiose past. I understand all these emotions. All these emotions are exploited by various interests, sure, but nevertheless without those emotions of the masses war couldn't happen.

What irks me is when people do not want to put themselves in the clothes of somebody else at all, an d just conclude that one group of people is not entitled to have a given emotion. So Ukraine is not entitled to defend themselves because <insert_some_rational_reason> but russia is entitled to defend their separatists because <insert_some_rational_reason>.

It's the double standard that irks me.

I think we can agree that war is shit and everybody would be better off without it.

But, no, that's not the proposed alternative. The proposed alternative is that a group of people, in this case the Ukrainians, effectively surrender and become diminished. Future generations of russians will look at them and say "we're justified in treating you ask shit because after all we won and you lost". This happened over and over in history. Hell, this is why most white supremacists think they are the chosen ones, because whites conquered.

So how should I judge the people who want to defend themselves? I honestly cannot blame them from trying their best.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-06-09 16:58:26+00:00
I've dealt with this at a previous employer (where we did try to be reasonably honest and submitted things that had some R&D element, I can imagine a less principled approach). The concept of it seems sensible, in practice you end up justifying why something is R&D to essentially non-technical people, probably at some consultancy who can then repeat a moderately garbled version of your description to HMRC who presumably just approve in most cases because they also don't have the expertise to truly assess the subject matter (and let's face it, we'd all struggle, even if we believe we're expert software engineers, how do you assess whether work on a mortgage issuing product for a bank is truly R&D if you have no familiarity with the domain).
by jchw | 2025-06-09 16:58:28+00:00
As far as protected speech as it relates to the Internet and American law though, I don't think I've really seen anything that has been debated quite as much, and not only that, it actually seems to have picked up considerable heat over time rather than quieting down. It first came around (at least in any way that I noticed it) with the Chris Handley case in 2008 and has become a serious point of debate online especially with younger people.

Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO, and I personally don't think people are all that split on it anyways, I think it's just a case where the people and the establishment disagree. BDS I'm simply not familiar with.

It does seem that there are new mounting challenges to free expression right now, but they're relatively new and it's unclear if they will stick around yet.
by jfengel | 2025-06-09 16:58:30+00:00
He can try, but it's a very uphill climb. The image of him throwing a Nazi salute are far from the worst thing he's done, but it is extremely memorable.

It's not that the DNC would have moral qualms about allying with a trillionaire, even one whose loyalties seemed to be for sale. He'd need to be on good terms personally with influential Democrats. The DNC is a long-term web of connections, and many would say that they're too slow to accept outsiders.

But he'd have to show that he has something to contribute beyond trolling Donald Trump. And just throwing money at the problem wouldn't suffice, without also making the right connections. And anybody who took his phone call would have to answer to people demanding to know why they're talking to the Nazi.
by mxuribe | 2025-06-09 16:58:35+00:00
True...but there are alternative approaches...such as maybe register a couple (not alot) of alternative, different domains. I think the trick is to keep the number of alternative domains low enough that it wont break the bank, but still give the option of serving as sort of backups. Then again, one would need to understand one's "threat" model before beginning to post content that might be "attacked" by others.
by tobr | 2025-06-09 16:58:36+00:00
I tried Cursor again recently. Starting with an empty folder, asking it to use very popular technologies that it surely must know a lot about (Typescript, Vite, Vue, and Tailwind). Should be a home run.

It went south immediately. It was confused about the differences between Tailwind 3 and 4, leading to a broken setup. It wasn’t able to diagnose the problem but just got more confused even with patient help from me in guiding it. Worse, it was unable to apply basic file diffs or deletes reliably. In trying to diagnose whether this is a known issue with Cursor, it decided to search for bug reports - great idea, except it tried to search the codebase for it, which, I remind you, only contained code that it had written itself over the past half hour or so.

What am I doing wrong? You read about people hyping up this technology - are they even using it?

EDIT: I want to add that I did not go into this antagonistically. On the contrary, I was excited to have a use case that I thought must be a really good fit.
by Tsarp | 2025-06-09 16:58:43+00:00
I'd love for you to try https://carelesswhisper.app

- Locally running, wrapper around whisper.cpp

- I've done a lot of work on noise profiling, stitching the segments. So when you are speaking for anything >2-3mins, its actually faster than cloud transcriptions. (Accuracy is a few WER off since they are quantized models).

- You can try without paying or putting in CC. After that ~19$ one time. No need to sign up or login.

- BYOK to use your groq, gemini free daily credits to rewrite. Support for thinking models too. can also plug into any locally running LLM.

- Works on my 1st gen M1 without a sweat.
by freedomben | 2025-06-09 16:58:53+00:00
> The difference is, I think, that guns are specifically designed to be destructive. Their purpose is to kill things, and not only is that their purpose, it's actually their only purpose. They can't do anything else.

Strange, I've been to the shooting range maybe hundreds of times in my life and I've never seen anything killed (or even injured), and a siginificant number of people got a lot of enjoyment and entertainment out of it. Perhaps alumnimun cans, plastic bottles, and paper targets are actually alive?
by thadt | 2025-06-09 16:59:25+00:00
Microsoft Word 365 (online) -> Transcribe.

I know, I know - it sounds super cheese, but after trying several different LLMs and workflows, it just worked out of the box and gave me what I needed: labeled speakers, timestamps, and a nice way to review/jump from the generated text to the audio. Didn't work so well for mixed languages, but for English at least it was comparable or better to the other solutions I tried.
by rybosome | 2025-06-09 16:59:48+00:00
This is a great point - communication is a vast array of information channels. “Motion” is communication whether or not it evolved to be, and so is every other aspect of occupying space in a biome.

And given that the organism under scrutiny is fungi - which contains many sprouting heads of the same underlying organism - one would have to have to have no familiarity with life at all to be surprised by intra-organism communication.
by dweekly | 2025-06-09 16:59:55+00:00
AssemblyAI's Universal ASR has got really impressive WER compared to Google Cloud Voice or Nova. I'm looking forward to their rolling out Slam-1's textual prompting, which will let you use plain English to describe the domain/context of the recording. Very reasonably priced. I've used it on about 10,000 speech hours for a service I built. As a bonus, it also can produce PII redacted audio files and transcripts for a very reasonable price. That used to be hugely tedious and expensive work.