MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mryall | 2025-06-15 20:48:32+00:00
Looks like a great start. Using Rust and TOML configuration are good choices.

With a project like this where there are many (many) existing attempts to solve it, I think it helps to take a hard look at what exists today and design your solution to solve a specific problem you see.

Then you can pitch it that way to your first adopters too - something like “Basel, but with easier deps” or “CMake, but with config humans can understand”.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-15 20:48:49+00:00
Interesting that you're repeating this all over. I guess there's a story, therein.

I can tell you that urban (and suburban) areas in the US can be quite ... interesting. Where I live (NY suburbs), it's not difficult to be in gang areas, about fifteen minutes in any direction. They usually keep their predations to themselves, though. The city neighborhoods that are run by the mob, on the other hand, are some of the safest in the nation (unless you're a crook). I have a friend that lives in Howard Beach, and he says that he sometimes forgets to lock his front door, and doesn't worry about it. Burglars end up in ICU, after "falling down the stairs."

Anyway, as I mentioned in another unread comment, the driver that picked them up, was probably not the driver associated with the account. Basic common sense. The person that explained it to me, mentioned the ways that the gypsy cab people have probably adapted to the new paradigm. Crooks are a lot smarter and more creative, than folks give them credit for.

The gun is unlikely to be used, unless the driver feels the need. They don't want trouble, they just want money, but even legit cabbies often go armed. They are ripe targets, and cab robbers are quite dangerous.
by tdeck | 2025-06-15 20:48:58+00:00
If anyone is interested in telephone exchange technology at all, I highly recommend checking out the Connections Museum in Seattle. They have multiple eras of electromechanical switching equipment up and running, and a huge collection of cool old phones, teletypes and payphones. They also have a great YouTube channel with very knowledgeable people.

https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html

https://m.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

I feel like they're not well known and there's no place like it!
by jdietrich | 2025-06-15 20:49:01+00:00
The loss of information from a reduction of bit depth is purely a reduction of signal-to-noise ratio; the least significant bit is dithered to eliminate quantization distortion. In normal domestic listening scenarios this is usually imperceptible, because the noise floor imposed by dither is below the threshold of hearing for any reasonable gain staging.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-dithering-in-audio....
Show HN: Zeekstd – Rust Implementation of the ZSTD Seekable Format
by rorosen | 2025-06-15 20:49:18+00:00
Hello,

I would like to share a Rust implementation of the Zstandard seekable format I've been working on.

Regular zstd compressed files consist of a single frame, meaning you have to start decompression at the beginning. The seekable format splits compressed data into a series of independent frames, each compressed individually, so that decompression of a section in the middle of an archive only requires zstd to decompress at most a frame's worth of extra data, instead of the entire archive.

I started working with the seekable format because I wanted to resume downloads of big zstd compressed files that are decompressed and written to disk on the fly. At first I created and used bindings to the C functions that are available upstream[1], however, I stumbled over the first segfault rather quickly (it's now fixed) and found out that the functions only allow basic things. After looking closer at the upstream implementation, I noticed that is uses functions of the core API that are now deprecated and it doesn't allow access to low-level (de)compression contexts. To me it looks like a PoC/demo implementation that isn't maintained the same way as the zstd core API, probably that's also the reason it's in the contrib directory.

My use-case seemed to require a complete rewrite of the seekable format, so I decided to implement it from scratch in Rust using bindings to the advanced zstd compression API, available from zstd 1.4.0.

The result is a single dependency library crate[2], and a CLI crate[3] for the seekable format that feels similar to the regular zstd tool.

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/zstd/tree/dev/contrib/seekable_f... [2]: https://crates.io/crates/zeekstd [3]: https://github.com/rorosen/zeekstd/tree/main/cli
by chucky_z | 2025-06-15 20:49:20+00:00
As I've gotten older, I have grown to understand that while a lot of these films are popular for good reason (and are extremely good!) some of the best films, objectively to me, are some of the 'quietier' ones.

I'd say that Up On Poppy Hill is probably my partner and I's favorite Ghibli film. It's 'small' and 'quiet' in that the scope is a single town, and there's nothing super fantastical about it. Every time I watch it I see and hear something new. This is definitely Goro's best film as a director at Ghibli.

The film that hit me the hardest though is The Wind Rises. If you are a married man this is a film that will absolutely effect you emotionally. There are some films that are targeted as extremely specific audiences and this is one of those. I think everyone can enjoy it, but there's a handful of scenes that are so specific that I connected with so directly that I could feel every moment that Miyazaki was trying to convey at that exact time.

There's another film that is definitely more biased to adults, that is Only Yesterday. It's probably the slowest paced film that Ghibli has made, however it's one that's stuck with me so thoroughly. Especially the final few scenes, which only when they're over do you realize was something like 15-20 minutes with maybe a handful of dialogue lines. This is also another non-Miyazaki film that is extremely good.
by jonatron | 2025-06-15 20:49:38+00:00
I visited an exchange back in 2009, when Local loop unbundling (LLU) on ADSL was big, and fibre was limited to large business and datacentres. The huge generator was probably more interesting than the racks of concentrators. I'm not sure how much battery back-up power time the new PON systems have, I assume less than a generator backed system.
by kp1197 | 2025-06-15 20:50:02+00:00
It is unclear to me is whether Kent recovered his cognitive ability or not. He says he has, "thanks to the genie" (which seems to be his name for coding LLMs). Does this mean that with a genie, he is now able to produce like he was before? Or that he used a genie to help "re-train" himself?
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-15 20:50:18+00:00
It is difficult to measure

These cloud services have great uptime generally, and they have become so centrally integral to the web that when they go down, everything goes with them

If a random person was hosting their own server somewhere, they would probably avoid the huge outages, but likely have more frequent smaller outages and nowhere near the reliable uptime that the big providers have, right?
by btilly | 2025-06-15 20:50:48+00:00
No, it is not different from the earlier claim. If you think that it is, then you were misreading me.

My earlier claim is that for each n, "PA proves that it proves that G(n) terminates". But in logic there is an important distinction to be made between "PA proves" and "PA proves that it proves". From the second, you cannot conclude the first. You must actually present the proof, and then verify it.

And the reason is this. It is true that, for all standard n, "PA proves that it proves" implies that "PA proves". But for nonstandard n it does not. Since PA cannot itself distinguish standard n from nonstandard n, PA cannot follow that implication to a proof.

(All of this is based on long conversations with my logic professor back in grad school. To the extent that I get it right, https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/marcia-j-groszek deserves the credit. To the extent that I get it wrong, I deserve the blame.)
by ricardo81 | 2025-06-15 20:53:05+00:00
Our old countries (and their tech) building on top of old.

Developing countries have less of a hassle with implementing something based on state of the art.

Lots of hassles with getting new phone lines, new power lines et al in the UK based on old agreements and a nationalised infrastructure. Please stop digging up roads and everything for arbitrary telecoms companies based on some deregulation, some collaboration please :-)
Show HN: I wrote a log streaming tool which takes 3 seconds to setup
by devparagiri | 2025-06-15 20:53:29+00:00
hey guys,

wanted a simple way to see logs from my vm on my phone, web etc.

w logsy, u simply paste a command in ur vm (secure w an api key) and ur done. no login, no storing, nothing.

u can filter through nginx, system, fastapi and log levels too

chk out the demo and lmk what yall think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8cRhjH22is
by o11c | 2025-06-15 20:54:00+00:00
The problem is that TLS was already in widespread use for "thread local storage".

Transport Layer Security is widely documented as beginning in 1999.

I can find references to "Thread Local Storage" going back to at least 1996. That particular term seems more common in the Microsoft (and maybe IBM, does anyone have an OS/2 programming manual?) world at the time; Pthreads (1995) and Unix in general tended to call it "thread-specific data".

It's possible that the highly influential 2001 Itanium ABI document (which directly led to Drepper's TLS paper) brought the term to (widespread) use in the broader Unix world, though Sun (for both Solaris and Java?) was using the term previously. But it's also possible that I'm just missing the reference material.
by robocat | 2025-06-15 20:56:10+00:00
> we are just the ridiculously elaborate reproductive mechanism

That is the point behind Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

The book well argues that genes are what reproduce, and that everything else is just complications to reproduce genes.

Humbling book - not light reading but I love it and I read it again and again because of the unobvious insights into systems.
Show HN: Go Port of OpenAI's Agents SDK
by matteogrella | 2025-06-15 20:57:18+00:00
Among the agentic AI frameworks I’ve tried, OpenAI's Python Agents SDK has the best balance of features and simplicity. Since I usually understand software by porting it to another language, I contributed to a Go reimplementation!

It’s a work in progress, but already quite usable. Repo: https://github.com/nlpodyssey/openai-agents-go

Feedback is welcome: on the design, missing features, refactoring ideas, building patterns, or anything else that could help improve it. Thank you.
by delusional | 2025-06-15 20:57:32+00:00
Assuming the stack trace is generated by walking up the stack at the time when the crash happened, nothing that works like a C function pointer would ever do that. Assigning a a pointer to a memory location doesn't generate a stack frame, so there's no residual left in the stack that could be walked back.

A simple example. If you were to bind a function pointer in one stack frame, and the immediately return it to the parent stack frame which then invokes that bound pointer, the stack that bound the now called function would literally not exist anymore.
by AI314159 | 2025-06-15 20:57:34+00:00
Thanks, that's great advice! I'll consider it. I've been meaning to update the readme for a while now, so this just gives me an excuse to do so. I think the most important thing to work on right now is compatibility. Obviously, people like OpenCV or Vulcan aren't going to switch, and so it should at least be easy for those who do to make the switch.
by mronetwo | 2025-06-15 20:58:24+00:00
> I know that AI will make it possible for others to do so, even if they drop the ball.

Seems you completely miss the point of Miyazaki's work. You can watch a video of Miyazaki watching an AI generated animation and see what he think about generative "art"[1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
by kridsdale3 | 2025-06-15 20:58:36+00:00
People who grew up in a certain SES class (of their parents) also tend to take on poverty-conditions when in college (oh man all I can afford this week are these cup noodles), and not to mention frequent destruction of the microbiome with alcohol. It's probably very disrupting. Maybe has something to do with why those who have a predisposition to having a psychotic break tend to have their first around 20.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-15 20:58:50+00:00
WhatsApp can be more specific but chooses not to. They want to access your entire address book and cross-match your number with all of your friends', especially if they're not on WhatsApp yet.

This isn't a technological problem with a technological solution. It's a policy problem on WhatsApp's side.

> As a programmer I dread writing any line of code that deletes files. I feel like there should be a low-level API that required me to say the file extension that my application is allowed to delete or something like that. It's still crazy to me that any single program can just delete all user files even though no user would ever grant it that ability. Until that is fixed the whole user permission model just feels like a big joke to me.

Yes, but I wouldn't want my file manager to double prompt me every time I try to delete a file (one from the FM, one from the OS). However, on Android at least, your application can request access to a specific (set of) file(s) or folder(s), so that the damage of a file deletion bug remains very limited. Your app can even request read-only access.

I don't think mobile platform have a good "recycling bin" API, though. There's one for media files, but I don't think that works for general files. Still, the Google Photos/Camera apps seems to use a system prompt to verify deleting files, so I think there's something at least.

And in my experience, users are too stupid to handle fine-grained permissions. Every time I see my parents, I need to go over all of the websites they've somehow managed to permit notifications for (despite my disabling that shit by default), and I'm not the only one. Research shows people will click "allow" without thinking and leave apps running and updating in the background for months before cleaning house. And notifications are only a minor annoyance (at least on Android, other platforms allow them to be pretty annoying), this isn't even about apps trying to track your location by accessing the metadata on your pictures.

For a few decades, we've tried educating people about how to use computers, and wave after wave of viruses proved that most people are incapable of using a computer securely, even with antivirus. In the modern dumbed-down phone landscape, downloading a virus is actually quite hard, and the viruses can do far less damage than what they could in the XP desktop computer era, but that dumbing down comes at a cost. Every unfortunate new sandboxing rule Google imposes on Android (usually) has a very good reason behind it for the vast majority of users, even if it ruins the day or week or month of tens of thousands of power users who rely on the freedom to do what they want with their phones.
by bhaak | 2025-06-15 20:59:02+00:00
The Ruby on Rails project I'm currently involved in doesn't struggle with training people, but rather with retaining them. There have been a few instances where we trained a junior developer and got them up to speed, only to lose them within a year. For small teams, this can be quite frustrating and disheartening.

This issue might be partly due to the project being in a somewhat niche and conservative industry, so there are no startup vibes. However, since they started looking for someone ready to make a longer commitment than a developer who has just started their career, things have improved. But this approach also limits the pool of available developers.

It's worth noting that we also use Elixir in this project (the chief architect is quite fanboyish about it), but we have never had any new developers come in with pre-existing knowledge of Elixir.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-15 20:59:23+00:00
I had done a few related things to some of these, in some of the programs that I had written. I also think that there is a benefit of emulation especially if it is not overly complicated, that the program can run on many computers. I also think that there is the benefit for the computer to be understandable. I may later consider some of the other stuff, such as game that only persists 64-bits.

> Properly handling unicode, syntax highlighting, cursor movement, multi-buffer support, panes/windows, tabs, search/find functionality, LSP support, etc.

You do not need all of these things to make up a text editor. What I would like to have better is a text editor and GUI with better support for non-Unicode text. A feature they didn't mention, that I find useful, is being able to send some text to an external program and replace it with the result; I do sometimes use this feature in vi.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-15 20:59:53+00:00
Maybe this is the wrong site for this viewpoint, but I don't see what in the world the best damn AR/VR painting game in the world has over actually painting.

Like an expensive canvas is what, $20? And paint can be had for like $5-10 a tube, and unless you just slather the shit on your paintings, you can go quite a long ways on a tube.

Like I play Call of Duty because I don't actually want to experience a warzone. Who wouldn't want to actually paint?
by globnomulous | 2025-06-15 20:59:57+00:00
Students of ancient languages fall into one of two camps: those who use translations for 'assistance' and those who don't. Classroom experiences have shown me that the two groups of students learn vastly different skills.

The group who struggle through texts by themselves with relying on any shortcuts -- they just sit with the text -- probably won't become top-shelf philologists, but when you give them a sentence they haven't seen before from an author they've read, the chances are very good that they'll be able to make sense of it without assistance. These students learn, in other words, how to read ancient languages.

The group who rely on translations learn to do precisely that: rely on a translation. If you give them a text by an author they've 'read' before and deny them use of side-by-side translation, they almost never had any clue how to proceed, even at the level of rudimentary parsing. Is that word the second-person-singular aorist imperative middle or is it the aorist infinitive active? They probably won't even know how to identify the difference -- or that there is one.

Our brains are built for energy conservation. They do what, and only what, we ask of them. Learning languages is hard. Reading a translation is easy. Given the choice betweem the harder skill and the easier, he brain will always learn the easier. The only way to learn the harder one is to remove the option: sit with the text; struggle.

So far I've been able to avoid LLMs and AI. I've written in other comments on HN about this. I don't want to talk to an anthropmorphic chat UI, which I call "meeting-based programming." I want to work with code. I want to become a more skillful SWE and better at working with programming languages, software, and systems. LLMs won't help me do this. All the time they save me -- all the time they steal from reading code, thinking about it, and consulting documentation -- is time they've stolen from the work I actually want to do. They'll make me worse at what I do and deprive me of the joy I find in it.

I've argued with teammates about this. They don't want to do the boring stuff. They say AI will do it for them. To me that's a Faustian bargain. Every time someone hands off the boring stuff to the machine, I'd wager they're weakening and giving up the parts of themselves that they'll need to call upon when they find something 'interesting' to work on (edit: and I'd wager that what they consider interesting will be debased over time as well, as programming effort itself becomes foreign and a less common practice.)
by ndiddy | 2025-06-15 21:00:15+00:00
Yeah all the fit and finish stuff was what I meant by build quality. Besides the stuff you mentioned, the back of the Touchpad was made of plastic and I was able to flex it by pushing on it, so it definitely didn't feel as premium as the iPad 2. Agreed that WebOS was fantastic from a software standpoint, the UI was years ahead of where iOS/Android were back then. Sadly, developer support dried up after a few years so my Touchpad spent the rest of its life flashed to Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
by hinkley | 2025-06-15 21:00:51+00:00
There's wanting to own one as property, and then there's wanting to own a souvenir of an experience. Like a patch, or a t-shirt, or a trophy.

Maybe they should do some Bob Ross events and give the paintings away either as a prize or do a charity raffle. Shit make a foundation to get art supplies to underprivileged kids and use the sales to establish a trust for the foundation.
by MichaelRazum | 2025-06-15 21:01:37+00:00
TLDR, just use PPO? I always found it kind of confusing, that on paper SAC or other algorithms seem to be much more sample efficient - but in practice it looks, as the author mentioned that they often do not work.

PS: Not sure where to put algorithms like TD-MPC or DreamerV3, since they are kind of in between, right?
by AI314159 | 2025-06-15 21:01:57+00:00
This, also my goal wasn't necessarily to replace existing tools, but to fill a gap. "If it isn't configured in TOML it isn't worth using" is something that I've heard, whether or not you agree. As for system packages, version conflicts do happen. My goal wasn't to replace existing build systems, or replace existing package managers, but to combine them. It isn't very good in its current state, but by combining two essential tools into one, I hopefully make it easier.
by prmoustache | 2025-06-15 21:02:49+00:00
The scarcity makes the demand. I doubt there are that much people wanting low/average quality paintings, even if it has the signature of a person as famous as him. But the 3 of them are willing to spend a lot of money on it. If anyone could buy an original batmobile, people would grow tired of seeing them in the street and they would lose their appeal really quickly.

Most fans of Bob Ross would probably have painted something similar. What he teached was that the enjoyment came from the process and that anyone could paint similar low/average uninspired stuff.
by gylterud | 2025-06-15 21:03:09+00:00
For sure there would have to be a meta theory of some sort. But, I think that many classical mathematicians would be happy with that meta theory to be weaker, rather than stronger. I don't think there is a need for that theory to have AC. After all, thanks to its independence of from the other axioms, AC does not add logical strength to a classical theory.

(For die-hard constructivists, such as myself, the story is of course different. But that story is for a another time. I am presenting the classical view here.)
by crote | 2025-06-15 21:04:40+00:00
Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean it isn't there. There are plenty of less on-the-nose examples a model can accidentally train itself on.

Into horseriding? Probably a woman. Into motorcycles? Probably a man. Into musical theater? Probably a woman. Into football? Probably a man. Worked part-time for a few years in your 30s? Probably a woman. I could go on and on for hours, as there are relatively few hobbies and interests which have a truly gender-neutral audience.

The problem isn't obvious bias. Everyone can see those and filtering them out is trivial. It's the subtle proxy values which are risky, as you have to be very careful to avoid accidentally training on those.

CVs should ideally indeed be stripped of such data, but how do you propose we verify that we stripped it of all potential proxies? And what's going to be left to train on after stripping?