MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chisleu | 2025-06-28 19:55:49+00:00
You are correct that inference speed per $ is not optimized with this purchase.

What is optimized is the ability to find tune medium size models (~200GB) / $

You just can't get 500GB of VRAM for less than $100k. Even with $9k Blackwell cards, you have $10k in a barebones GPU server. You can't use commodity hardware and cluster it because you need fast interconnects. I'm talking 200-400GB/s interconnects. And those take yet another PCIe slot and require expensive Infiniband switches.

Shit gets costly fast. I consternated about this purchase for weeks. Eventually deciding that it's the easiest path to success for my purposes. Not for everyone's, but for mine.
by kelnos | 2025-06-28 19:56:04+00:00
I used to care about this, but these days it just seem pointless, and I just can't summon a slice of my limited energy for attention to care about this. I also find many of the reasons listed to be somewhat irrelevant:

> HTML as a vector for phishing

> Privacy invasion and tracking

> Higher incidence of spam

> Mail client vulnerabilities

These are all potentially reasons to disable the display of HTML email in your own mail client, but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email. As a sender, I know I'm not trying to phish my recipient, or invade their privacy or track them, or spam them, or try to trigger a mail client vulnerability. So these just don't matter.

From the recipient's point of view, many people receive HTML emails (that don't have an embedded plain-text alternative), and actually do need to read those emails. The kind of person who doesn't, likely already is a firm believer in plain-text-only and doesn't need to be convinced.

And other reasons seem dubious:

> HTML emails are less accessible

This is odd, because HTML has accessibility features built into it. Certainly a bunch of plain text is easier for a screen reader to deal with, but only if the sender doesn't care about conveying formatting or nuance at all. Later in the piece, the author suggests using asterisks, underscores, etc. to indicate bold/italic/etc., but I expect screen readers don't know what that's supposed to mean, so using such a thing will make your emails less accessible, not more.

> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all

The kind of people who use mail clients that can't display HTML email at all are probably not in your target audience if you are going to send HTML email. If people like that have deliberately chosen to use software that can't display everything out there, that's their choice, and they can deal with the consequences.

And anyway:

> In a text-only interface it's not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text.

Then that's a missing feature in the terminal mail reader. If lynx and links can render HTML to a terminal in a useful, readable way, a mail reader can do so too.

> A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason.

"A lot" is doing a bit of work there. I guess "a lot" of people in the author's small bubble?

> Rich text isn't that great, anyway

That's opinion, not fact, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I happen to be one of them. I actually don't use much in the way of text styling in my emails, but it's nice to have the option, and as someone who does sometimes receive actually-useful, non-spam HTML emails, the presentation/styling often does add to the experience, not detract.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-28 19:56:08+00:00
>Everyone uses “JavaScript” to describe a language—not a brand.

It can be both.

>Everyone knows JavaScript isn’t an Oracle product

But older people should know that it was a Sun product and Oracle bought Sun.

Edit: Sun actually only licensed the name. But in the renewal it points to an Oracle product called Oracle JavaScript Extention Toolkit.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn75026640&docI...
by leakycap | 2025-06-28 19:56:08+00:00
I think your questions beg another: where can we just take out this layer of complexity, and how?

Sometimes rather than chasing edge cases, I find another way to do the same thing using a routine or library that already has all the edge cases ironed out.

If you're a small team or one person, you can't expect to stay on top of something that starts broken.
by atmosx | 2025-06-28 19:56:16+00:00
I grew up listening to Paco De Lucía on long family road trips to Italy. My dad had a deep appreciation for guitarists like Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits, Eric Clapton (hey hey, from the unplugged), BB King and of course, Paco De Lucía. We had a double “greatest hits” CD of his that played on repeat. I remember those drives from the backseat as a kid, the car gliding along as if it were floating. Some of my fondest memories.
by jopsen | 2025-06-28 19:56:20+00:00
> One must destroy the other for peace to exist - this is the nature of war.

Wars generally don't end with genocide.

Conquered people don't cease to exist. Worst case they are subjugated, but these days they just assimilated/absorbed.

The alternative is perpetual war, or some sort of compromise.

If Hamas surrendered unconditionally tomorrow, what would Israel do?
by transpute | 2025-06-28 19:56:30+00:00
Jane Street's reported use of LLMs + OCaml, https://archive.is/HSVJN

> Using Vcaml and Ecaml, they wired AI tools straight into Neovim, Emacs, and VS Code.. RL Feedback: The system learns from what works, tweaking itself based on real outcomes.. Jane Street records the [developer] journey — every tweak, every build, every “aha!” moment. Every few seconds, a snapshot locks in the state of play. If a build fails, they know where it went south; if it succeeds, they see what clicked. Then, LLMs step in, auto-generating detailed notes on what changed and why. It’s like having a scribe for every coder, building a dataset that’s not just big — it’s relevant. For niche languages or closed-off systems, this could be the future.
by renerick | 2025-06-28 19:56:36+00:00
H in HATEOAS stands for "hypermedia". Hypermedia is a type of document that includes hypermedia controls, which are presented by the hypermedia client to a user for interaction. It's the user who makes decision what controls to interact with. For example, when I'm writing this comment, HN server gave a hypermedia document, which contains your comment, a textarea input and a button to submit my reply, and me, the human in the loop, decides what to put in it the input and when to press the button. A machine can't do that on its own (but LLMs potentially can), so a user is required. That also means that JSON APIs meant for purely machine to machine interactions, commonly referred to as REST, can't be considered HATEOAS (and REST) due to absence of hypermedia controls.

Further reading:

- https://htmx.org/essays/how-did-rest-come-to-mean-the-opposi...

- https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas/
by krackers | 2025-06-28 19:57:25+00:00
Not just hardware, he ruined UI design as well. Everything iOS 7+ (which hasleaked into macOS) is basically his doing, or at least had to be approved by him. Trading Scott Forstall for Johnny Ive was probably the the biggest blunder that Cook made, which put Apple on its current trajectory in terms of software & ui decline.
by a10r | 2025-06-28 19:57:41+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of `vet`. I've always been a bit nervous about the `curl | bash` pattern, even for trusted projects. It feels like there's a missing safety step. I wanted a tool that would show me a diff if a script changed, run it through `shellcheck`, and ask for my explicit OK before executing. That's why I built `vet`.

The install process itself uses this philosophy - I encourage you to check the installer script before running it!

I'd love to hear your feedback.

The repo is at https://github.com/vet-run/vet
by paulpauper | 2025-06-28 19:57:53+00:00
Facebook hasn’t had new product success outside of acquisitions in at least a decade.

You don't need a 'new trick' when the main business is so frigging profitable and scalable. There is this myth that companies need to keep innovating. At a certain point, when the competition is so weak, you don't.

Tobacco stocks have been among the best investment over the past century even though the product never changed. Or Walmart--it's the same type of store, but scaled huge.

The fact that a newcomer like TikTok came and ate Instagram’s lunch is downright embarrassing.

Not really. Instagram is more popular than ever and much more profitable. It's not all or nothing .Both sites can coexist and thrive, like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
by rapjr9 | 2025-06-28 19:58:00+00:00
I've often wondered if lead in products is part of an intentional attack on the Western world. Maybe it's just a side effect of lowering production costs, but it could also be an attack to make a nation sick and stupid. The lack of product testing makes it particularly easy to do. There may be laws against using lead in products, but it seems to be found repeatedly, and there does not seem to be much actual testing.
by leakycap | 2025-06-28 19:59:22+00:00
I was a Mac fan when it looked like BeOS was going to be the next Mac OS - some Mac magazines even sent bootable BeOS CD-ROMS. I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt.

After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.

It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.
by F3nd0 | 2025-06-28 19:59:44+00:00
The main problem I always encountered when sending plan-text e-mails was quote formatting. The 72-character limit works well enough for my own reply, but when the quoted replies already consist of 72-character lines, adding several levels of indentation can break those up and mess up the formatting, since the client doesn’t extend the character limit for the quoted parts, resulting in something like this:

> > > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do

eiusmod

> > > tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Leaving it like that annoys me, while fixing it by hand gets tedious very fast. I suppose some clients might know how to handle this automatically, but I’ve never had the fortune of using one. (And frankly, plain-text formatting is not among my most important criteria when choosing an e-mail client.)

As many gotchas as HTML e-mail might have in practice, I find the basic idea of giving messages semantic structure make a whole lot of sense. And as for top posting, I understand the criticism, but I find it very suitable for straightforward, back-and-forth exchanges, which comprise a decent part of my e-mail communication. So overall, I can’t say I’m entirely sold on plain-text e-mail.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-28 19:59:50+00:00
> Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore

SpaceX raised private capital. It continues to raise private capital. (It still tapped into public coffers for Crew Dragon, though, because the demand side of that market remains entirely public.)

It could do this because NASA had committed to the Artemis programme. That’s the demand. ESA has no similar promise of returns for a private backer; giving money to these guys strikes closer to a grant or donation than investment.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-28 19:59:58+00:00
This is a topic near and dear to my heart, I have a startup I’m bootstrapping to pay people who don’t want kids to not have them. “We buy unwanted fertility.” This covers their out of pocket costs for the healthcare needed to affirm their reproductive choice.

The data is robust that some don’t want children out of economic reasons, and others don’t want them out of lifestyle choices (prioritizing self over a thankless job). Across several national pro natalist policy programs, the evidence shows that even when enormous amounts of benefits are provided, it barely moves the realized fertility outcome.

(40% of pregnancies in the US and internationally, annually, are unintentional, and we have enough humans we don’t take care of already [1], we should be radically empowering as many as people who don’t want to have kids to not have them)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407283
by bob1029 | 2025-06-28 20:00:00+00:00
> However, I wonder whether the GPU's are a good fit for this to begin with.

I think the GPU could be a great fit for OLAP, but when it comes to the nasty OLTP use cases the CPU will absolutely dominate.

Strictly serialized transaction processing facilities demand extremely low latency compute to achieve meaningful throughput. When the behavior of transaction B depends on transaction A being fully resolved, there are no magic tricks you can play anymore.

Consider that talking to L1 is at least 1,000x faster than talking to the GPU. Unless you can get a shitload of work done with each CPU-GPU message (and it is usually the case that you can), this penalty is horrifyingly crippling.
by jolmg | 2025-06-28 20:00:06+00:00
You can still make the decision whether to top-post or inline-post based on your recipient. Programmer's mailing list -> inline post. Family member -> top post. You can send a stranger an inline post, somehow confirm they were able to view it, and include them in your mental whitelist of people that understand inline posting.

Kind of like how one adjusts their language / choice of words / choice of topics based on their recipient.
by skydhash | 2025-06-28 20:00:28+00:00
But that's not really automation.

It's more search and act based on the first output. You don't know what's going to come out, you just hope it will be good. The issue is that that the query is fed to the output function. So what you get is a mixture of what is a mixture of what you told it and what's was stored. Great if you can separate the two afterwards, not so if the output is tainted by the query.

With automation, what you seek is predictability. Not an echo chamber.

ADDENDUM

If we continue with the echo chamber analogy:

Prompt Engineering: Altering your voice so that the result back is more pleasant

System Prompt: The echo chamber's builders altering the configuration to get the above effects

RAG: Sound effects

Agent: Replace yourself in front of the echo chamber with someone/something that act based on the echo.
by alberth | 2025-06-28 20:00:40+00:00
> a screenshot of the Node.js website to show use of the “JavaScript” trademark. As the creator of Node.js, I find that especially offensive.

There is some irony in that Ryan isn’t acknowledging Node.js own trademark in his post, given that he was the person who announced the Node.js trademark.

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/uncategorized/trademark

So he wants Node.js trademark to be acknowledged, but doesn’t acknowledge it himself.

Oracle wants the JavaScript trademark acknowledged, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge that either.

This all seems very silly to me.
Ask HN: What are your favorite funny things from the old internet?
by firefax | 2025-06-28 20:00:41+00:00
the thick coin [1] recently and rightfully made the front page, where many were in awe of the designer's eye for design (hence the title "designer".) what other humorous or well designed pages from the early internet did you enjoy?

[1] this is a link to the thick coin [2]

[2] thick-coins.net
by kubectl_h | 2025-06-28 20:00:49+00:00
> Just curious, are there similar sites recording the repeated terrorist attacks against Israel?

From your parent comment:

> I've spent my life watching news reports of bombings at their border, bus stops, public squares, their fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and children picked off.

There has never been a time in the last 30 years where attacks against Israel were insufficiently covered.
by alkonaut | 2025-06-28 20:01:10+00:00
Hard no.

Use whatever format and formatting your recipient wants. What they want is just a function of what client they use. If you are in an Outlook organization then just do whatever outlook does.

If you send to an external recipient you’ll need to guess, but if the recipient is at a medium to large corporation, chances are it’s Outlook there too.

And it’s not that people with html clients can’t read plaintext. It’s that it just looks odd to the recipient.

Once every 10000 emails I send something to one of the ”technical communities” mentioned. I can switch to plaintext then, or bottom/inline reply etc - because they expect or require it. But switching outright because a tiny group of niche techies find it a good idea? No, sorry. Email was eaten by gmail and Outlook and the only chance to change anything would be if their defaults changed (which isn’t happening).
by cevi | 2025-06-28 20:01:46+00:00
Unfortunately no, ZFC isn't good enough to capture arithmetical truth. The problem is that there are nonstandard models of ZFC where every single model of second-order PA within is itself nonstandard. There are even models of ZFC where a certain specific computer program, known as the "universal algorithm" [1], solves the halting problem for all standard Turing machines.

https://jdh.hamkins.org/the-universal-algorithm-a-new-simple...
by lovich | 2025-06-28 20:01:46+00:00
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if you deviate from the current standard behavior.

We’ve all seen companies do layoffs just because “Wall Street” was concerned about the economy and then instantly see the stock price spike up.

These negative consequences are all results of bog standard prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
by afiodorov | 2025-06-28 20:02:02+00:00
There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've achieved the level of the crowd whom the language belongs to in the first place.

P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
by keiferski | 2025-06-28 20:02:21+00:00
These studies always miss the obvious cultural point to me, [1] which is that knowing more than one language usually means you deeply understand more than one culture. This by default makes one a bit more capable of nuance, seeing other perspectives, etc. Languages are not just interchangeable collections of words, but are whole worldviews. Language in this sense is a kind of knowledge and not a different brain state, akin to reading books about history to understand a conflict better.

1. Maybe that’s not their fault, as they are ostensibly interested only in the biology. But it still seems like a major hole when discussing the benefits of being bilingual.
by Xcelerate | 2025-06-28 20:02:33+00:00
Yeah, I’m quite familiar with Friedman’s work. I mentioned him and his Grand Conjecture in another comment.

> This ignores the fact that it is not so easy to find natural interesting statements that are independent of ZFC.

I’m not ignoring this fact—just observing that the sheer difficulty of the task seems to have encouraged mathematicians to pursue other areas of work beside foundational topics, which is a bit unfortunate in my opinion.
by kelnos | 2025-06-28 20:04:25+00:00
That's a dangerous assumption to make. Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law. The next administration (or even this one, given how fickle Trump can be) may ramp up enforcement again and go after people committing violations during the current period.

And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
by potatolicious | 2025-06-28 20:05:24+00:00
Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too much.

In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such.

In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.

Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't think that's even a real factor here.
by smikhanov | 2025-06-28 20:05:46+00:00
Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?

Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.
by kelnos | 2025-06-28 20:07:07+00:00
"This website" is a diverse bunch of people with diverse goals and policy positions. Please don't make generalizations.

Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).

I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
by gizajob | 2025-06-28 20:07:07+00:00
Contra to Thiel and comments in this thread, something in my gut tells me Elon is still fairly serious about Mars. If humans don’t make it, then I’m pretty sure within 20 years he’ll be sending off teams of Optimus robots to walk all over it and set up a camp. Then who knows, even though Mars is inhospitable in the extreme. I think he’ll at least try and build the Mars base and then see. Also there’s no laws on Mars - Earth treaties are irrelevant at that distance so he really could set himself up as the overlord and Emperor of a whole planet. I think that’s actually his dream.

Also, anyone find it strange that he’s never been up in one of his own rockets? Unless he’s done it in secret without telling anybody (not impossible to believe even though he loves publicity) he seems pretty shy about taking trips himself. Or paranoid about dying in his own Promethean creation.
by lormayna | 2025-06-28 20:07:15+00:00
I am only an amateur go developer, but I have some questions:

* what is the sense of this project? NATS is quite the standard for this use case in Go and you can also embed it in a golang binary

* the code seems a bit "strange" to me: why not using existing libraries for structured logging? No unit tests, no usage of interfaces (i.e. persistence can implement writer interface), etc.