MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by demosthanos | 2025-06-15 13:50:30+00:00
> is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM)

Nit: this makes it sounds like the BEAM was designed for web dev, which it was not. Erlang came out of Ericsson and was built for telecoms (OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform), which is where its unique set of trade-offs comes from. Many of those trade-offs make a ton of sense for web but that's not because it was designed for web, it's because there's overlap between the fields.

One way to see the difference between telecoms and web is to ask yourself when was the last time that you were working on a project with an availability SLA of 9 nines (1/3 of a second of downtime per year) or even 6 nines (32s per year). Some web dev has that, but most doesn't come close, and if that's not you then Erlang wasn't built for you (though you may still find you like it for other reasons!).
by bell-cot | 2025-06-15 13:51:35+00:00
(2022)

And popular on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

From my own experience (Michigan, not New York), I'd say this is as much about children and younger men liking noise as it is about the rich liking quiet. Plus quite a few older folks, with failing hearing, find some formerly-inoffensive types of noise unpleasant.

And either way (favoring noise, or quiet) is often an assertion of individual importance and group identity. Babies don't cry because they lack money.
by 0points | 2025-06-15 13:51:55+00:00
Ok, that's another post by you, this time about XZ Spectrum and Z80 assembly.

Let me rephrase my question:

In what sense is Z80 related to the link in this thread, which is about using LLM to decode a golang(?) binary, which you also didnt address any of the questions i raised about your analysis.

What is going on.
by mightyham | 2025-06-15 13:52:44+00:00
Even though there is much more freedom in poetry, it is still defined by a specific set of rules/features: verses, rhythm, stanzas, spacing, meter, and rhyming. It's only because of these restrictions that it is so obvious when writing is or isn't poetry. These features and forms can streched, but unlike lisp they cannot be completely redefined.
by a2128 | 2025-06-15 13:53:30+00:00
You're adding metadata, but what problems does this added metadata solve exactly? If your converter can automatically compute these image features, then AI training and inference pipelines can trivially do the same, so I don't see the point in needing a new file format that contains these.

Moreover, models and techniques get better over time, so these stored precomputed features are guaranteed to become obsolete. Even if they're there and it's simple to use in a pipeline and everybody is using this file format, pipelines still won't use it when they were precomputed years ago and state-of-the-art techniques give more accurate features.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-15 13:54:06+00:00
The ability to physically move fast has relatively little role in bullet beyond a certain level, because most games will end on the board instead of in a frantic mouse scramble. This was even tested, to some degree, in one of chess.com speed chess championships. They had a bunch of top players including Alireza and Nakamura play one of the little reflex games where you have to click in a certain spot that lights up, and their performance was nothing noteworthy. Nakamura, the oldest player by far, was actually the fastest but his reflexes were again nothing spectacular, so it was more of a reflection of the reflexes of the other players.
by gavinray | 2025-06-15 13:54:06+00:00
Maybe I'm jaded, but I fail to see how a bespoke file format is a better solution than bundling a normal image and a JSON/XML document containing metadata that adheres to a defined specification.

It feels like creating a custom format with backwards PNG compatibility and using steganography to cram metadata inside is an inefficient and over-engineered alternative to a .tar.gz with "image.png" and "metadata.json"
by not-so-darkstar | 2025-06-15 13:57:54+00:00
Yes, I meant Perl 5. Raku is a totally different beast. I got interested in Perl exactly because of its scripting capabilities. I want to replace Bash, sed, awk, etc. with a single, more powerful, language (without having to remember a billion flags/strange syntax).

I think it's fascinating how well it integrates in a Unix system and I find it very nice how concise it can get.
by account-5 | 2025-06-15 13:58:42+00:00
At face value this seems reasonable, but (and this might just be me) because its being pushed by Google I have to ask myself: what's in it for Google, and what am I missing?

Manifest 3 for example breaks adblockers for the sake of 'security', and adverts are Google's business. Passkeys are pushed for security as well (and do have benefits) but for the average person locks you into a eco-system; another business model plus for Google.

So with that in mind, how does this benefit Google at the expense of the user? Making the permissions less explicit, or less separate from the content of a site might be a net benefit to Google... I don't know.

I might also be reading way too much into motivations, and/or paranoid.
by _kb | 2025-06-15 13:59:18+00:00
HTTP range requests [1] are enabled out-of-the-box on both Apache and NGINX for static content. If you slap a fMP4 [2] onto a vhost it will work. No CDN needed.

Going viral is a seperate technical challenge, but probably not needed in almost every use case.

[1]: https://http.dev/range-request

[2]: https://cloudinary.com/glossary/fragmented-mp4
by potato-peeler | 2025-06-15 13:59:18+00:00
Thanks. I think some apps do need to connect to Microsoft to deliver services like update and antivirus.

Some are used by the products itself to maintain reliability like maps and store.

Others are diagnostics, which can still be manually turned off.

Not sure why one would maintain a dedicated hosts file to block endpoints if they can simply configure this on app level itself.
by grues-dinner | 2025-06-15 14:02:10+00:00
Resistance is V/I. You literally cannot have current flowing in a resistor without a voltage across it (either the voltage causes the current to flow, or the resistor in the path of a flowing current has a voltage appear across it).

A voltage drop with a flowing current is power (P=VI).

There is literally nothing you can do to avoid resistors dissipating that power as heat, it's just what they are. If they didn't do it, they wouldn't be resistors.

What you can do is use larger resistances which need less current to see the same voltage (e.g. change a pull up from 10k to 100k or higher, but that's more sensitive to noise), or smaller resistances that drop less power from a given current (e.g. a miiliohm-range current shunt, and then you need a more sensitive input circuit) or find another way to do what you want (e.g. a switched-mode power supply is far more efficient than a voltage divider at stepping down voltage). This is usually much more complex and often requires fiddly active control, but is worth it in power-constrained applications, and with modern integrated technology, there's often a chip that does what you need "magically" for not much money.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-06-15 14:02:45+00:00
Hm, I misunderstood, I thought the checkpoint system was also concurrency control to make sure nobody else had changed it from underneath you between read and write, since you had to read and write the whole (mega) document even though you only wanted to change a part (sub-document).

Doesn't the KV provide idempotency on it's own -- so long as you're checking that no changes have happened between read and write, why wouldn't doing the same write twice produce an idempotent result? A change happenening between read and write seems the only reason that would be a problem.

But clearly it's complicated and we don't have the whole picture as to business needs. Definitely sounds awful.
by amy214 | 2025-06-15 14:03:09+00:00
The issue is how a person looks at it. You could say:

1) the cause was a null pointer, so let's fire that programmer and get a good one in there who doesn't make stupid mistakes.

Or instead taking a different angle and attitude:

2) Every programmer makes null pointer mistakes at some point, we need to treat human workers, though incredibly gifted, as not 100% perfect. Thus this is a failure of our system and our policies to catch a scenario that was inevitable

This type of thinking and parallel applies to any and all high risk situation, least of which is whether google cloud works, but also things like "my airplane crashed" or "the surgeon removed the wrong leg"
by Torwald | 2025-06-15 14:04:11+00:00
reply to parent and grandparent:

> Python looks like an ordinary dumb language, but semantically it has a lot in common with Lisp, and has been getting closer to Lisp over time.

> They might even let you use Ruby, which is even more Lisp-like.

https://www.paulgraham.com/lispfaq1.html
by IshKebab | 2025-06-15 14:05:07+00:00
Yeah. But C++, C, Java and I think even Go don't let you easily encode nullability into the type system. There have been many attempts to fix it (e.g. `@Nonnull` in Java) but none are as good as Typescript or Rust for example. Dart actually started off with implicit nullability and switched to explicit which was a huge effort.
by andy99 | 2025-06-15 14:05:12+00:00
We investigate whether frontier language models can accurately classify transcripts based on whether they originate from evaluations or real-world deployment, a capability we call evaluation awareness.

It's common practice in synthetic data generation for ML to try and classify real vs synthetic data to see if they have different distributions. This is how a GAN works for example.

Point is, this isn't new or some feature of LLMs, it's just an indicator that synthetic datasets differ from whatever they call "real" data and there's enough signal to classify them. Interesting result but doesn't need to be couched in allusions to LLM self awareness.

See this paper from 2014 about domain adaptation, they are looking at having the model learn from data with a different distribution, without learning to discriminate between the domains: https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7495
by sergiotapia | 2025-06-15 14:07:10+00:00
Rails has more baked in for the typical crud app. Example:

Try to create a way for people to upload documents like images and PDFs and documents. Okay easy enough on both platforms and I want you to generate a preview for each of those files so that people can easily find those files. Now I want you to add pagination. Now I want you to add column sorting so that people can sort by file size or by name or by upload date. Finally I want you to add a search field. Going by the way all of this stuff needs to live in the URL so that you can bookmark all the different you know choices you've made.

The stuff is pretty trivial and rails but in elixir you would have to bake it all yourself very boring code that doesn't really matter. This is why I chose to build my startups admin dashboard in rails despite our main production API being an elixir.
by ysofunny | 2025-06-15 14:08:33+00:00
I think "recursion" simpy said, allows for algorithms which end as much as "not ending algorithms".

but in practice, an algorithm has gotta end, otherwise it's not very useful. I think some academics would go as far as insisting a function or process which never ends is not even a proper "algorithm"; but I digress.

recursion does allow us to "reach the infinite"; however, philosophically, we can only ever grasp the finite.
by michaelt | 2025-06-15 14:09:04+00:00
A 4k 30fps video sensor capturing 8 bits per pixel (bayer pattern) image, is capturing 2 gigabits per second. That same 4k 30fps video on Youtube will be 20 megabits per second or less.

Luckily, it turns out relatively few people need to record random noise, so when we lower the data rate by 99% we get away with it.
Show HN: Mana Blade – 3D Mmorpg in React Three Fiber and WebGPU
by jverrecchia | 2025-06-15 14:10:21+00:00
Hi HN! I spent almost a year full-time building my dream MMO, Mana Blade.

I use Three.js' WebGPURenderer, and shaders are written in TSL (Three.js Shading Language), a node-based abstraction over GLSL and WGSL. WebGPURenderer falls back to WebGL if WebGPU is not available, so the game runs in all browsers. It runs well on mobile and can be played in both landscape and portrait.

The entire front-end is in React, including everything in the 3D scene, thanks to React Three Fiber. The client weighs only 2 MB, and the page loads in about 2 seconds on a good connection. It's a PWA, so you can install it on desktop and mobile.

The backend is written in Bun, and the infrastructure is split into multiple VPSes. There are 3 regional gameplay servers (EU, NA, Asia) for low-latency combat, and the front-end, DB, and API are hosted on a single VPS in Europe. So unlike games like WoW, you can play with friends worldwide, but may have some latency depending on which server you pick when starting a quest. Quests are instanced and voiced. There is no open world besides the city, which is a worldwide hub, but the mechanics are similar enough to traditional MMOs for me to call it an MMO.

If you're interested in building games in JavaScript, check out Web Game Dev. It's a website, newsletter, and Discord community of 2000 members that I created a few years ago. Plenty of skilled folks hang out there.

Happy to answer questions!
by dbushell | 2025-06-15 14:10:42+00:00
It makes it easier for users to enable permissions, accidentally too, and thus lower security and privacy. Google products are designed to exploit that. Google probably has data showing a large number of users have disabled such permissions globally, with no easy path to trick them into opting back in. That would be the cynical view!

edit: also one can never be too paranoid around Google.
by AIorNot | 2025-06-15 14:10:51+00:00
Mtbennett:

You propose a physicalist theory which is super interesting and I will read it in depth

But question: what is consciousness itself except as can be described by consciousness?

What do you make of the idea that consciousness (or universal consciousness of some form) is the fundamental substrate for existence

Eg (link to a Rupert Spira video https://youtu.be/FEdySF5Z4xo?si=z2fEgEW8AG3CcCC2

Or as in analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup

https://youtu.be/P-rXm7Uk9Ys?si=78165IH_ZIvWnJC9
by afavour | 2025-06-15 14:11:10+00:00
I appreciate the effort being made here but the more I think about it the more I’m convinced it’s a no-win scenario.

Modal permission prompts are very annoying but inline prompts will need to have styling severely limited (as they do here) to avoid nefarious use. Almost all web sites with a designer attached will end up continuing to use styled buttons that call the modal prompt when clicked. I guess this sort of works as a <noscript> equivalent for permissions… but you can’t use the majority of those permissions without JavaScript anyway.

This special class of element also feels like a maintainability nightmare for browser teams. What happens when I put a <div> on top of this prompt with pointer-events:none on it? Would be textbook example of how you could mask the prompt. I’m sure you can fix that but there must be a hundred whack a mole problems I haven’t even thought of.
by gumboshoes | 2025-06-15 14:12:29+00:00
I think there's some straw-manning happening in the Reddit comment. I don't know anyone who uses LLMs daily who writes such facile prompts. It's simply the same advice as everyone else is giving: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of your results depends on the quality of your prompt. And even then it depends on which LLM you're using.

If there's any prompt-writing advice that is less commonly seen that is worth sharing more than anything in OP's remarks, it's this: instead of asking for something or giving commands, start your LLM-related work with an open query like: "Here's {a collection of facts and circumstances outside my usual skillset}. What do you think?" With the big LLMs you typically get big-picture responses of the good vs. bad variety, and most of the time, I get ideas I hadn't considered. It's the rubber ducky tactic, basically, but if you're careful not to inject much presupposition in the original prompt, you actually hear back from ducky more than you told it.
by sebmellen | 2025-06-15 14:12:54+00:00
If I trained at a community hospital in Nepal, am I going to need US residency standards? We don’t know. That’s why we have standard board exams and admission pathways that all US physicians need to follow. We should not compromise on that.

We can expand US MD and US DO schools and fill our thousands of unfilled Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatric Subspecialty residency slots first!
by franciscop | 2025-06-15 14:13:08+00:00
I'm not from the US, I'm from Spain and while they are better in Japan than in Spain, it's not like the "out-of-world" difference that I'm seeing in these comments. That's why I'm confused, I expected the US to be similar to Europe in these regards. I have taken Uber a couple of times while traveling to the US (long ago though), and while they were dirtier than in other countries it wasn't that bad as the comments suggest.

So either things have gone dramatically downhill or I had a "good" experience in my brief US rides relatively speaking.

As a non-American, I am not sure why it's so crazy to think standards would be high in other countries? Grab standards and quality in e.g. Taiwan, Thailand, etc IS within the same order of magnitude as Japan and those are much poorer countries than the US.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-15 14:14:15+00:00
We must not have read the same essay. You are correct that it is about state warfare but it is also about terrorists. (The word “terrorism” is in the title!)

> Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism

> But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.

> But a drone is a suicide bomber without the expensive bottleneck in targeting.

Their whole point is that the reason terrorists do not employ these tactics is that suicide bombers want to be remembered for destroying the White House rather than some numbered interstate highway; even if said highway is critical national infrastructure. Drones take that ego out of the equation. They don’t care if they’re used to blow up a highway and they especially don’t care that the last thousand drones failed.
by analog31 | 2025-06-15 14:14:29+00:00
I'm not an introvert by any means, but I still choose whichever system is likely to work better.

At the supermarket, if I'm doing my monthly giant shopping trip and filling the car with non-perishables, I go through the attended checkout. Those people are quick and accurate, and there are two of them -- a checker and a bagger.

But if I only have one or two items, there's no line at the self-checkout, and I just throw the stuff into my backpack.

I wonder if a lack of class divisions is what encourages small talk in our society.

One thing about automated systems is that they have to work perfectly or they don't get used. I thought about this when taking the tram from the terminal to the parking facility at O'Hare Airport. I honestly don't know if the tram has a human driver or not. If that tram has a breakdown, it cause instant gridlock throughout the airport. And the way you make things work better (in the traditional quality control sense) is to make them more predictable.

And admittedly, I'm not shy, but I'm just a bit muddle-headed. With an app, I can see every detail of my request on the screen (and be looking at Google Maps on another screen maybe, or other information sources) before I click "accept." This makes it easier. But when I click "accept," I really don't care if the car that shows up has a human driver or not. I'm also pretty much oblivious as to whether it's a Mercedes or a Chevy.
by alganet | 2025-06-15 14:14:52+00:00
"I mean, today we can do jet engines in garage shops. Why would they needed a catapult system? They could have used this simple jet engine. Look, here is the proof, there's a YouTuber that did a small tiny jet engine in his garage. They were held back by ideas, not aerodynamics and tooling precision."

See how silly it is?

Now, focus on the simple question. How would you train the 300K model in 1997? To run it, you someone to train it first.
by jcupitt | 2025-06-15 14:16:26+00:00
Hello, libvips author here. This is probably the canonical thread about libvips and memory fragmentation, and the funniest graph:

https://github.com/lovell/sharp/issues/955#issuecomment-5458...

(that specific graph is for switching from glib to the musl memory allocator, but jemalloc gives a very similar result)
by eggsby | 2025-06-15 14:17:19+00:00
Seems to be enforcing ‘ubiquitous language’ at the machine level - not some kind of mathematical dual where one is invertible to the other - but enforcing soft skills as hard skills.

‘protobuf specs dont have enough information for us to codegen iceberg tables so we will write a new codegen spec language’

what makes a duck a duck? when we know which tables we can find it in
by ai_critic | 2025-06-15 14:17:42+00:00
Reality check:

Your extra data is a big JSON blob. Okay, fine.

File formats dating back to Targa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truevision_TGA) support arbitrary text blobs if you're weird enough.

PNG itself has both EXIF data and a more general text chunk mechanism (both compressed and uncompressed, https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Chunks.html#C.An... , section 4.2.3, you probably want iTXt chunks).

exiftool will already let you do all of this, by the way. There's no reason to summon non-standard file format into the world (especially when you're just making a weird version of PNG that won't survive resizing or quantization properly).
by happens | 2025-06-15 14:20:15+00:00
The solution is arguably not super straightforward, but `2&>1` can be emulated by creating a pipe2 and then passing it to both stderr and stdout for the command.

LLMs are useful to me in a lot of ways, I just found it hilarious that it runs into the same pattern over and over and then just gives up, but _still recognized that it's failing_ - most of the time it just confidently outputs broken rust.
by antonvs | 2025-06-15 14:20:50+00:00
I don't agree. What do you think enterprises should be using instead?

C# and that ecosystem is much more Windows-focused, which makes it quite unsuitable for server development in general. Go is the last dying gasp of 1970s programmers who can't let go of explicit pointer management and Tony Hoare's notorious billion dollar mistake. JavaScript and Typescript are not serious contenders except in the browser.

That starts to leave more niche languages. Languages such as Rust and Haskell, much as I love them personally, are not viable for the average enterprise developer.

The widespread use of Java in enterprises is far more than simply inertia. It's probably one of the more rational choices that those companies have collectively made.
Show HN: I built a tool that tells you what to do to grow on Reddit and LinkedIn
by countofarthur | 2025-06-15 14:22:40+00:00
I used to waste hours figuring out how to market my startup on Reddit and LinkedIn. I got banned 6 times on Reddit before finally cracking what works.

So I built MediaFa.st — a tool that gives you a daily roadmap of exactly what to post, where to post, and how to sound natural across Reddit, LinkedIn, and X.

It’s based on what got me from 0 to 10k+ visits and $5K+ in sales, all organically.

MediaFa.st helps indie hackers, founders, and makers avoid the marketing burnout — no more guessing, just follow your personalized content plan.

Would love feedback from this crowd:

What would make this more useful for you? Should I expand it to other platforms? Any edge-case marketing tactics you wish were automated? Happy to answer questions and dive into how it works.