MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matt_s | 2025-06-08 23:05:43+00:00
Revolutionary technology I think needs to be something that gets across that early adopter chasm. We haven't really seen any 3D or goggle tech do that. There are VR things but I wouldn't consider VR video games a mainstream set of people. Mainstream to me is smartphones, AI usage, etc. things that catch on with the majority of the population.

I think that anything that is going to require humans to wear something on their head for entertainment purposes is not going to make it to mainstream. There will be niche uses and likely video games are a good niche. What is going to compel people to buy something like the Vision Pro when they already have smart phones that can do everything anyways?

Also, humans over 40 tend to start needing reading glasses and with each year of age more and more people need them. Its hard to have any device that covers the eyes also take into account people's vision issues, minor or major.
Show HN: Biski64 – Fast PRNG (~.40ns/call), Passes BigCrush/PractRand, Injective
by daniel_cota | 2025-06-08 23:06:05+00:00
biski64 is an extremely fast PRNG I wrote for non-cryptographic tasks.

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/danielcota/biski64

Highlights:

* ~0.40 ns/call. 100%+ faster than xoroshiro128++.

* Easily passes BigCrush and PractRand (64TB).

* Invertible and proven injective via Z3 Prover.

* Scaled down versions show even better mixing efficiency than well respected PRNGs like JSF.

* Minimum 2^64 period and parallel streams - through the use of a 64-bit Weyl sequence.

* no_std compatible in Rust (implements RngCore) and requires only stdint.h in C.

Seeking feedback on design, use cases, and further testing.
by robocat | 2025-06-08 23:06:12+00:00
The other agent is often a human.

A human getting paid 1 cent per second ($36.00 per hour) is 75k/yr (cost to business is ~2x that).

So if Claude manages to save 11 seconds of human time for 11 cents, that would be a good deal.

Tax section 174 makes the employee costs amortised, so spending on Claude as an expense to save employee costs is more valuable than first appearances.
by ckmiller | 2025-06-08 23:06:17+00:00
Growing up in Cincinnati, the Omnimax at the museum center was a huge influence. The light tunnel intro (one of many adapted from the Graphic Films Corporation logo [1]) absolutely blew my mind and gave me a lifelong obsession with computer graphics.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-09F87C6Ps
by meroes | 2025-06-08 23:06:18+00:00
There are middle-men companies like Scale that recruit thousands of remote contractors, probably through other companies they hire. There are of course other less known such companies that also sit between the model companies and the contracted labelers and RLHF’ers. There’s probably several tiers of these middle companies that agglomerate larger pools of workers. But how intermixed the work is and its scale I couldn’t tell you, nor if it’s shifting to something else.

I mean on LinkenIn you can find many AI trainer companies and see they hire for every subject, language, and programming language across several expertise levels. They provide the laborers for the model companies.
by bredren | 2025-06-08 23:06:52+00:00
The author mentions code signing as a tricky ecosystem thing. Well, wait until the app has to get new assets to be resubmitted with bug fixes for new versions of iOS.

And if they don’t keep updating it, it will stop working and the buy it for life idea commits the dev to maintenance that isn’t paid for either upfront or through subscription.

There are folks who make and give away a lot but some learn their lesson quickly and find ways to get people to put a reasonable amount of recurring payment into the app to make it even remotely sustainable beyond a hobby.

FWIW, AI may make this cost so much lower that this kind of thing can make sense now. Something to consider, I suppose.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-08 23:07:43+00:00
Former GPU guy here. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to suggest too, with emphasis on #2 and #3. What kind of jobs are they trying to apply for? Is it really CUDA that they need to be familiar with, or CUDA-based libraries like cuDNN, cuBLAS, cuFFT, etc?

Understanding the fundamentals of parallel programming comes first, IMO.
by dhon_ | 2025-06-08 23:08:09+00:00
This is the best explanation I've found of the mechanics of pitch bending https://youtu.be/Fp-GxEaChr0?si=-E9uDTQx51gtnd9C

Essentially, match the size of the resonance chamber in your mouth to the note you're trying to bend to. This is different for every note you bend. You can find the right size by making "hissing" noises while breathing in (without harmonica) and matching the pitch.
by vrosas | 2025-06-08 23:08:28+00:00
One thing I've learned working for startups is if you're working for a founder who's already had a previous successful startup exit(s), two things are true:

1. the founder already has generational wealth and this current company means practically nothing to them.

2. they've already learned every trick in the book to keep the company's value in their own pocket and out of the hands of their employees.
by OJFord | 2025-06-08 23:08:37+00:00
Surely you have also to act on it in some way?

I don't agree with the 'ideology' but I don't find it totally unreasonable or objectionable.

And surely even 'everyone who doesn't worship X and abstain from Y and live according to text Z is living in sin' is... That's just an ideology, that's fine, it's not terrorist until you do some sort of destructive act in its name or try to enforce it somehow?

Some context lost in the linked article I think, not having read into it.
by reaperducer | 2025-06-08 23:12:54+00:00
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.

You must be too young to have experienced the time when it was expected that you would build your own computer at home, and either write your own software for it, or get it for free (or just a duplication beer) from the local computer club.
by Stratoscope | 2025-06-08 23:13:47+00:00
> Lower notes are generally easier to bend than higher notes

One thing to note (pun intended) is that you can only bend the higher of the two notes in a hole. On the lower half of the harmonica, those are the draw notes. But the upper octave switches these around. The blow notes are the higher ones there, and those are the ones you can bend.
by fragmede | 2025-06-08 23:14:00+00:00
> spending today-dollars and exercising options for the right to sell stock 5 or 10yrs into the future almost never works out

There are places that will, no recourse, loan you the money to exercise and pay the tax, in exchange for some percentage of the profit, provided it's for a company they like. Meaning, they lend you the money, but if there's no IPO/liquidity event, you don't owe them any money. 70% (say) of a big number may not be as big as 100% of a big number, but 100% of zero is $0. Which isn't financial advice, just a bit of math.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-08 23:14:50+00:00
Coming from embedded development, where it's mostly crappy SOC vendors providing a barely-working SDK and toolchain they cobbled together from an ancient version of gcc, moving to iOS development / Xcode was in most aspects a breath of fresh air. It does have its annoyances, though. Code signing, provisioning profiles, entitlements, AppStore wizardry... And the developer program fee is a bummer: It means you can't sustainably release free apps unless you're willing to just ignore that you're burning $100 a year forever.

Other frustrations: Apple makes it difficult to maintain support for older devices. They insist you keep updating your tools, but the updated tools tend to drop support for older SDKs and devices. You have to kind of go out of your way to keep your app targeting them. You can see how this plays out by getting a second hand iPhone 7 today and go to the AppStore looking for apps. It will be very difficult to find an app that will run on it. This phone is not that old, but the ecosystem abandons you pretty quickly.

They also deprecate things like crazy, so every time you update your tools, you get more warnings about APIs Apple would rather you stop using. It's tough to just write an app once in 2016 and keep it limping along forever. They clearly favor developers who are 1. doing it for a living, 2. targeting latest and greatest devices, 3. updating their app and their tools frequently, and 4. don't mind doing surgery every year to move away from deprecated stuff.
by Arelius | 2025-06-08 23:16:51+00:00
Honestly, it's probably simpler than this, and the root of the problem often comes down to the Cloud Providers to begin with.

It's astounding the frequency I get an email from some cloud provider, or mobile app store that says something to the effect of:

"(Version X) of Dependency Y that we convinced you to use 5+ years ago is getting deprecated on August 1st, if you don't upgrade to Version X+5 you're service will go offline"

And we're stuck looking at the minimal amount of players running of that platform, and the hard choice of do we move precious human resources off of some in-progress game, that's already running late to learn a system that they never worked on, because the original people are long gone?

So, that's often why our network services, and mobile versions of our games are being taken offline while the single binary we shipped to one of the serious console vendors 10-20 years ago is still running, and now running on consoles 2 generations newer.

So, yeah, it'd be great if we could ship a package for Amazon to host perpetually, but first you could just get Amazon to care enough to ship a stable platform to build upon that wouldn't get depreciated.
by ngcc_hk | 2025-06-08 23:17:27+00:00
But that is why America is great (not make it great or again). No. It is not getting more that is the issue. As said many if not just the first one is immigrants (and might be illegal hinted) … it is they stopping them and tax cut so the rich can hold on their rich that is the problem.

You want more kids around to try and “great” to rock the boat a bit. Too much stability no good. Too much chaos no good. But you need both.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-06-08 23:18:54+00:00
Neither French nor Italians have any serious EVs that I know of.

Ford had some good clearance discounts on Mach-E (same with Polestar) here, made it a reasonable deal.

Rivian seems expensive in US to start with, in NZ it's waaaay past most peoples buying power.

Dunno if Chevy is available here at all.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-08 23:19:44+00:00
> The attitude "we put paper standards" and the community should step in for the implementations and tooling

Khronos is a consortium financed by its members, who either implement the standards on their own hardware or otherwise depend on the ecosystem around them. For example, competing GPU vendors typically implement the standards in parallel with the committee meetings. The very people who represent their company in Khronos are typically leads of the teams who implement the standards.

Source: used to represent my employers at Khronos. It was a difficult, thankless job, that required almost as much diplomacy as technical expertise.
Ask HN: In 15 years, what will a gas station visit look like?
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-08 23:20:03+00:00
This struck me as an interesting sci-fi writing exercise. Gas stations are everywhere; but they'll likely change considerably going forward.

Imagine visiting a gas station in 2040:

• will it sell gas?

• what convenience items will it sell?

• who, if anyone, will staff it?

• what payment methods will it accept?

• what signage and decor will it use?

• will it offer new services?
by krisoft | 2025-06-08 23:20:37+00:00
This sounds very wise but doesn’t seem to describe any of my use cases. Maybe some use cases are divination but it is a stretch to call all of them that.

Just looking at my recent AI prompts:

I was looking for the name of the small fibers which form a bird’s feather. ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was looking for. How is this “divination”?

I was looking for what is the g-code equivalent for galvo fiber lasers are and ChatGPT told me there isn’t really one. The closest might be the sdk of ezcad, but it also listed several other opensource control solutions too.

Wanted to know what are the hallmarking rules in the UK for an item which consist of multiple pieces of sterling silver held together by a non-metalic part. (Turns out the total weight of the silver matters, while the weight of the non-metalic part does not count.)

Wanted to translate the hungarian phrase “besurranó tolvaj” into english. Out of the many possible translations chatGPT provided “opportunistic burglar” fit the best for what I was looking for.

Wanted to write an sql alchemy model and i had an approximate idea of what fields i needed but couldn’t be arsed to come up with good names for them and find the syntax to describe their types. ChatGPT wrote it for me in seconds what would have taken me at least ten minutes otherwise.

These are “divination” only in a very galaxy brained “oh man, when you open your mind you see everything is divination really”. I would call most of these “information retrieval”. The information is out there the LLM just helps me find it with a convenient interface. While the last one is “coding”.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-08 23:20:44+00:00
"Words have no essential meaning" and "speech carries responsibility" aren't contradictory. They're two ends of the same bridge. Meaning is always projected by the reader, but that doesn't exempt the speaker from shaping the terrain of projection.

Acknowledging the interpretive nature of language doesn't absolve us from the consequences of what we say. It just means that communication is always a gamble: we load the dice with intention and hope they land amid the chaos of another mind.

This applies whether the text comes from a person or a model. The key difference is that humans write with a theory of mind. They guess what might land, what might be misread, what might resonate. LLMs don’t guess; they sample. But the meaning still arrives the same way: through the reader, reconstructing significance from dead words.

So no, pointing out that people read meaning into LLM outputs doesn’t let humans off the hook for their own words. It just reminds us that all language is a collaborative illusion, intent on one end, interpretation on the other, and a vast gap where only words exist in between.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-08 23:20:48+00:00
Quite a bit of discussion about Nightshade:

Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators (590 points, 2024, 686 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058428

Nightshade, a tool allowing artists to 'poison' AI models (77 points, 2023, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013151

New data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (93 points, 2023, 86 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990750
by AndyKelley | 2025-06-08 23:21:20+00:00
Indeed, good observation. Another observation is that 82% of that is debug info.

-OReleaseSmall -fno-strip produces a 580K executable, while -ODebug -fstrip produces a 1.4M executable.

zig's x86 backend makes for a significantly better debugging experience with this zig-aware lldb fork: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/LLDB-for-Zig

I don't recall whether it supports stepping through comptime logic at the moment; that was something we discussed recently.
by redserk | 2025-06-08 23:21:27+00:00
Why not? We don’t know his motivations for political donations.

At the very least it might be worth questioning what he found appealing about each candidate’s view of NASA and leadership. But an outright disqualification over this?

Should we pull up voter records and see which party’s primary each person participated in?

I’d strongly prefer a society where agency leaders are picked for their expertise, not party allegiance.
by Apreche | 2025-06-08 23:22:06+00:00
It’s not complicated. The Republican party serves the interests of the obscenely wealthy. That very much includes fossil fuel tycoons and friends. If people believe in climate change, fight it, and move away from fossil fuels, that ruins their investments and their fortunes. They don’t like that.

This bill ensures those in power increase their power. The transfer of wealth continues and wealth inequality grows. From their point of view, mission accomplished. They don’t care if people or the Earth itself are harmed. They actually enjoy that it harms others.

I keep saying this, but I have to say it again. They are just evil. When you accept this, everything about the right wing is easy to understand.
by echelon | 2025-06-08 23:22:57+00:00
"infatuation"?

This feels like some journalist obsession. I don't think America is obsessed with tech billionaires. It's the journalists that keep writing about them.

If America is infatuated with anyone, it's the Kardashian / Jenner family.

If you aren't aware, the latest news in that sphere is Kylie's new boob job. TikTok won't stop talking about it.

Google Trends shows that Kylie alone gets 10x the interest that Mark Zuckerberg does.

Tech geniuses can't touch pop culture.
by ngcc_hk | 2025-06-08 23:23:17+00:00
It might be. But given there is no common interest agreed by them, which country you want to give up to have start ii.

I want this and that and then I will just do whatever I want afterwards …

The game moves on and might be humanity cannot be saved. But reality bites. And just hope people would not give the tyrants (including USA now) whatever they want for the peace …

Reality bites.
by refinehqai | 2025-06-08 23:25:24+00:00
Hey HN! We built Refine as a simpler, faster alternative to Clay — for modern GTM teams who want to run enrichment, research, and data cleanup tasks without building complex workflows.

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You can: – Run enrichment on leads to get contact & company data – Research prospects using AI agents – Clean up messy CRM lists (e.g. job title normalization)

It’s designed for sales teams, marketers, recruiters, and founders — especially those who’ve tried Clay, Apollo, or done enrichment manually.

Try it live: refinehq.ai Happy to get your feedback or questions. Would love to hear how you’re solving this problem today.
by fasthands9 | 2025-06-08 23:27:21+00:00
Interesting Q - though I predict they will largely look the same. They may have more battery charging stations or replacement batteries (especially for stations on an interstate) but otherwise I think it will just be a nicer version of what we have today. Maybe higher quality hot food and more interesting snacks, which I think we are already seeing today with new stations.

Most gas stations today only have one employee at a time so it seems hard to cut that down (and not much incentive tbh).

Electric cars today are still under 10%. Cars last a really long time, so even if there is a huge surge in electric self-driving cars by 2030 there will still be lots of ICE cars on the road in 15 years.
by digdugdirk | 2025-06-08 23:28:30+00:00
From someone in the product design/manufacturing space - this wouldn't change much. The problem with titanium isn't the material cost (which is expensive, but could be justified in a variety of scenarios) but rather everything else about it. Its an absolute pain in the rear to work with, your manufacturing base is tiny, specialized equipment and tooling is needed, it makes tiny little incendiary devices when being cut, etc.

Its cool, and it has plenty of applications where it is the only choice. But those applications already use it, and lowering the material cost isn't going to make more designers decide to just start using it on a whim.

(PS - This could be more useful if titanium 3d printers start becoming more accessible. But again, that's a low volume manufacturing process so the material costs still don't play much into final part cost.)
by throwaway-blaze | 2025-06-08 23:31:06+00:00
It seems like most of the "woe is me and my startup" problems people are talking about could be solved with a revenue floor. If this only applied to companies making, say, $50mm+ per year or with software-related R&D expenditures of say $10mm+, it would not hit startups or innovative small companies working on far-flung ideas. I feel bad about those laid off from Meta and MSFT but I will not cry for those companies.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-06-08 23:31:27+00:00
Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself.

Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis.

USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.

How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
by wenc | 2025-06-08 23:31:31+00:00
I've never worked in Germany, but I worked for the U.S. branch of a German multinational company, reported to a German manager and visited Germany a couple of times.

Living in Germany felt like it wasn't for me. There is very little diversity in ethnic foods (doner kebaps and Italian was about as ethnic as it got, outside of a sprinkling of Chinese restaurants), and everything felt really old (in a conservative way -- not in an artistic way like in Paris). Foodies would struggle with Germany (great breads, sausages, pork, and beer but nothing else stands out).

German management was also not for me -- it felt really old-fashioned compared to American management, and it was hard to do anything new -- there were a lot of gatekeepers where it was their way or the highway. Ideas would get discussed and blocked at every turn, and there were lots of rigid egos.

The U-Bahn/S-Bahn/ICE train systems there were good (undoubtedly, better than anything in America), but compared to Asia or other parts of Europe, they felt a bit old and not really that punctual. The whole place just lacked dynamism.

It's ironic because I've admired Germany all my life. This is, after all, the land of Gauss, Bach, Goethe, Beethoven, etc. It's the land of great physicists and chemists.

Yet there is a sense that what was once great about Germany (all the great thinkers, high tech, etc.) is not really at the forefront anymore. Instead, I saw a nation resting on its laurels, and accepting too much bureaucracy in many aspects of life.

If I was into doing lifestyle optimization, I feel I'll find a decent, if unexciting, life in Germany where my basic needs are taken care of.

But I feel if you really want to work on something new and exciting, that's not the place to be. (I was in Munich where the money is but people are conservative when it comes to new things. I heard Berlin is much more innovative but generally have no money to scale).
by SyzygyRhythm | 2025-06-08 23:32:19+00:00
I went to Space Camp in Huntsville in '89 or so. One of the perks was a daily showing at their Omnimax theater. Felt absolutely incredible at the time. The most memorable moment was a scene where they filmed the Space Shuttle tower escape system--basically a basket on a zipline that goes into a sand pit. Everyone in the theater instinctively leapt forward when the basket hit the sand. The difference, I suppose, is that the screen filled your peripheral vision as well. I didn't experience the same level of immersiveness until VR, much later on.