MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-26 22:23:12+00:00
Just to review, here are the options:

1. Create an 8gb file on network storage which is loopback-mounted. Accessing the file requires a block store pull over the network for every file access. According to your claim now, these giant blobs are rarely shared between jobs?

2. Create a Docker image in a remote registry. Layers are downloaded as necessary. According to your claim now, most of the containers will have a single layer which is both huge and changed every time python packages are changed, which you're saying is usually done for each job?

Both of these seem bad.

For the giant loopback file, why are there so many of these giant files which (it would seem) are almost identical except for the python differences? Why are they constantly changing? Why are they all so different? Why does every job have a different image?

For the container images, why are they having bloated image layers when python packages change? Python files are not huge. The layers should be between 5-100MB once new packages are installed. If the network is as fast as you say, transferring this once (even at job start) should take what, 2 seconds, if that? Do it before the job starts and it's instantaneous.

The whole thing sounds inefficient. If we can make kubernetes clusters run 10,000 microservices across 5,000 nodes and make it fast enough for the biggest sites in the world, we can make an HPC cluster (which has higher performance hardware) work too. The people setting this up need to optimize.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-06-26 22:23:23+00:00
Wasn't this the promise of Google "Duplex"? (edit: not Duo).

A tech demo from 2018.

But what's the point of this over text messages from the start?

TTS is a thing, and if you can't organize your speech properly, you could of course use an AI agent like ChatGPT to summarize your message while it's turned into text, or even into any arbitrary structured format.

You can even check that the output matches what you meant before submitting!
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-26 22:24:00+00:00
For C# there is the ECMA specification for it https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...

But who cares if there's a public body who owns the specification? The Supreme Court ruled Google's use of the copyrighted APIs fell within fair use. That gives, within the US (other countries will have other legal circumstances) a basis for anyone to copy pretty much any language so long as they steer clear of the actual copyrighted source code (don't copy MS's C# source code, for instance) and trademark violations.
by gagik_co | 2025-06-26 22:24:49+00:00
I’m sure in a nice community cafe you could just ask them to hold onto your phone if you really wanted to. This is one of those Silicon Valley things where everything needs to be commodified with some nice branding and an app offering a solution to a problem solvable with “talk to other humans”.

I thought this was a timeleft kind of deal about pairing for dinner with strangers but it’s barely even that.
by taylorallred | 2025-06-26 22:24:53+00:00
I'm curious about that point you made about dependencies. This Rust project (https://github.com/microsoft/edit) is made with essentially no dependencies, is 17,426 lines of code, and on an M4 Max it compiles in 1.83s debug and 5.40s release. The code seems pretty simple as well. Edit: Note also that this is 10k more lines than the OP's project. This certainly makes those deps suspicious.
by lapcat | 2025-06-26 22:25:42+00:00
German law is basically irrelevant unless you're in Germany. All that matters is what Apple makes App Store developers do, and Apple doesn't give a crap as long as you have some address and some phone number that Apple can verify.

Apple doesn't even police the "trader" self-declaration. I've seen several (scam) developers in the App Store who are clearly traders but have declared that they're not traders in the EU. Apple's compliance here is mostly perfunctory.
by ACow_Adonis | 2025-06-26 22:26:05+00:00
See this article: Why do econ journalists keep making this basic mistake.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-econ-journalists-keep-m...

Source: am economist, and the writer of the blog is 100% correct.

Reporting and commentary on GDP and economics stats is just generally bad.
by arp242 | 2025-06-26 22:26:27+00:00
> It's not really "Who knows". We actually do know.

I'm not so sure about that to be honest. A few years ago (around 2020 or 2021 IIRC) autotools switched from the old deprecated backquotes to $(..) to run programs in shell, and people complained that it no longer worked with their SunOS shell or some such. I've also seen some Vim bug reports about stuff breaking on obscure old systems. In short, I think you may be underestimating the "long tail" of weird/old systems.

Personally, I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to just say "sorry, we're not supporting that any more, you can keep using the existing version" because the number of people doing this seems quite small. But they do seem to exist.
by qualeed | 2025-06-26 22:26:37+00:00
As you've just demonstrated, that point can be made without even mentioning Zig, let alone copy/pasting some compile time stuff with no other comment or context. Which is why I thought (well, hoped) there might be something more to it than just a dunk attempt.

Now we get all of this off-topic discussion about Zig. Which I guess is good for you Zig folk... But it's pretty off-putting for me.

whoisyc's comment is extremely on point. As the VP of community, I would really encourage thinking about what they said.
by ianbicking | 2025-06-26 22:27:26+00:00
I've been thinking and playing slightly with this concept myself. A few thoughts:

1. Using a standard transcription service is pretty tricky because it's going to correct the user's speech. Or make it incorrect! Standard transcription is predicated on the speaker saying things correctly.

2. I've tried sending the audio directly to OpenAI to address this issue. I can't say if it works or not. It's very hard to test or understand a system without a transcript as a source of truth!

3. I'd like to learn a new language as a beginner, and all of these AI systems work poorly for this. It's great to immerse the learner in the language, but if you know NOTHING then it's not that helpful.

4. Language learning needs to be MUCH more multimodal than a standard chat. Especially as a beginner.

5. The AI should be generating translations and explanations alongside its responses. I'd like to be able to inspect everything the AI says (in the language I'm learning) to understand it.

6. Emoji would be another easy way to annotate the text.

7. I think giving the user/AI a subject to talk about would be helpful. Again, a subject that is not language-based would be great, like an image or something.

8. As a very new learner I would like an experience where I respond in my native language and then I'm told how to translate this to the language I'm learning. This should include a pronunciation guide. Then I should repeat the phrase I'm given.

9. I should still be able to ask questions in my native language and probably get a response in my native language. But with some prompting the AI should be able to distinguish these two cases.

10. For low latency it's nice if you produce the spoken text quickly, but you still have the opportunity to get the LLM to produce _more_ material immediately after. This is where things like translations can be produced.

11. You probably don't have timestamps on your TTS, but if you did and could highlight words as they were spoken that would be _great_. Probably worth choosing a TTS provider with that in mind.
by cratermoon | 2025-06-26 22:28:33+00:00
Some code that can make Rust compilation pathologically slow is complex const expressions. Because the compiler can evaluate a subset of expressions at compile time[1], a complex expression can take an unbounded amount of time to evaluate. The long-running-const-eval will by default abort the compilation if the evaluation takes too long.

1 https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/const_eval.html
by Waterluvian | 2025-06-26 22:29:08+00:00
I’ve never seen this level of anti-American sentiment in Canada in my whole life.

One thing I have my eye on is how hard consumer habits are to change. For example, American alcohol is simply gone from store shelves in Ontario. I can only imagine how much marketing work went up in the wind now that consumers have adapted. Returning the product to the market is probably not even the hard part.
by brokencode | 2025-06-26 22:29:10+00:00
I mean, that’s what I’m saying too. I think AI companies will have to pay for content to be competitive in the market. Either that or I guess they could write their own content.

Yes, the government needs to force them to stop stealing first. Similar to how the government stops contractors from going to Home Depot and stealing all the two by fours.

The government doesn’t force contractors to buy wood, it only stops them from stealing it. It’s the profit incentive that leads contractors to buy wood.
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-26 22:29:45+00:00
You can address the junk problem manually by having generic functions delegate as much of their work as possible to non-generic or "less" generic functions (Where a "less" generic function is one that depends only on a known subset of type traits, such as size or alignment. Then delegating can help the compiler generate fewer redundant copies of your code, even if it can't avoid code monomorphization altogether.)
by chubot | 2025-06-26 22:29:55+00:00
There’s also google, yandex, baidu, and bing, which are incredible amounts of c++ code

And probably lots of robotics, defense, and other industries

Granted, those aren’t consumer problems, but I would push back on the “last redoubts”.

We should absolutely move toward memory safe languages, but I also think there are still things to be tried and learned
by KoolKat23 | 2025-06-26 22:30:10+00:00
They're not merely slightly correlated.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Just because it is alien to you, does not mean it is not a brain, please go look up the definition of the word.

And my comment is useful, a VLA implies it is processing it's input and output natively, something a brain does hence my comment.
by cyberax | 2025-06-26 22:30:38+00:00
> Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B.

Google's revenue in 2014 was $75B and in 2024 it was $348B, that's 4.64 times growth in 10 years or 3.1 times if corrected for the inflation.

And during this time, Google failed to launch any significant new revenue source.
by zahlman | 2025-06-26 22:30:43+00:00
Wikipedia tells me:

> Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.[1]

> Proprietary software is a subset of non-free software, a term defined in contrast to free and open-source software; non-commercial licenses such as CC BY-NC are not deemed proprietary, but are non-free. Proprietary software may either be closed-source software or source-available software.[1][2]

The Python development team, via the LICENSE file in the GitHub repository, tells me

> All Python releases are Open Source (see https://opensource.org for the Open Source Definition). Historically, most, but not all, Python releases have also been GPL-compatible; the table below summarizes the various releases.

This license is also described on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_License .

Similarly, the reference Rust implementation (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust) is licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses.

In what sense is FOSS software a kind of non-FOSS software?
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-26 22:30:48+00:00
> There will always be people who know how to handle the complexity we're trying to automate away

This is not a given!

If we automated all accounting, why would anyone still take the time to learn to become an accountant?

Yes, there are sometimes people who are just invested in learning traditional stuff for the sake of it, but is that really what we want to rely on as the fallback when AI fails?
by Kranar | 2025-06-26 22:32:04+00:00
>the Supreme Court confirmed—that they own copyright in the APIs.

To use your own terminology, this is clearly and objectively false. The US Supreme Court made no such finding.

What the court concluded was that even if Oracle had a copyright on the API, Google's use of it fell under fair use so that making a ruling on the question of whether the API was protected by copyright was moot.
by tedunangst | 2025-06-26 22:32:59+00:00
I just ran cargo check on nushell, and it took a minute and a half. I didn't time how long it took to compile, maybe five minutes earlier today? So I would call it faster, but still not fast.

I was all excited to conduct the "cargo check; mrustc; cc" is 100x faster experiment, but I think at best, the multiple is going to be pretty small.
by zikani_03 | 2025-06-26 22:33:30+00:00
This is well put. I once built a tool called [zefaker] (github.com/creditdatamw/zefaker) to test some data pipelines but never managed to get a good pattern or method for generating data that simulates actions or scenarios that didn't involve too much extra work.

Was hoping this AI dataset generator solves that issue, but i guess it is still early days. Looks good though and using Faker to generate the data locally sounds good as a cost-cutting measure, but also potentially opens room for human-in-the-loop adjustments of the generated data.
by jeffhwang | 2025-06-26 22:34:09+00:00
When I was restudying biology a few years ago, it was making me a little crazy trying to understand the structural geometry that gives rise to the major and minor grooves of DNA. I looked through several of the standard textbooks and relevant papers. I certainly didn't find any good diagrams or animations.

So out of my own frustration, I drew this. It's a cross-section of a single base pair, as if you are looking straight down the double helix.

Aka, picture a double-strand of DNA as an earthworm. If one of the earthworms segments is a base-pair, and you cut the earthworm in half, and turn it 90 degrees, and look into the body of the worm, you'd see this cross-sectional perspective.

Apologies for overly detailed explanation; it's for non-bio and non-chem people. :)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CWSH5qslm27/

Anyway, I think the way base pairs bond forces this major and minor grove structure observed in B-DNA.
by malfist | 2025-06-26 22:34:24+00:00
The heat from dehumidification gets dumped into the dehumidied air. Better to turn down the AC and only use a dehumidifier if absolutely necessary to keep humidity below dangerous levels.

You'd be surprised how much heat they dump into the air. 400 watts of dehumidification can easily be 1200 watts of latent heat.

You should think of dehumidifiers as small space heaters that dry the air a bit.
by anerli | 2025-06-26 22:35:02+00:00
Glad you were able to get it set up quickly!

We currently are optimizing for reliability and quality, which is why we suggest Claude - but it can get expensive in some cases. Using Qwen 2.5-VL-72B will be significantly cheaper, though may not be always reliable.

Most of our usage right now is for running test cases, and people seem to often prefer qwen for that use case - since typically test cases are clearer how to execute.

Something that is top of mind for is is figuring out a good way to "cache" workflows that get taken. This way you can repeat automations either with no LLM or with a smaller/cheap LLM. This will would enable deterministic, repeatable flows, that are also very affordable and fast. So even if each step on the first run is only 95% reliable - if it gets through it, it could repeat it with 100% reliability.
by k310 | 2025-06-26 22:36:34+00:00
I never proposed to either a chatbot or a billionaire [0]

Who says that the president isn't already a chatbot, himself? [1] Think about this article.

Enjoy.

[0] https://people.com/man-proposed-to-his-ai-chatbot-girlfriend...

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgp...
by shmeeed | 2025-06-26 22:38:13+00:00
>"Don't Believe Everything You Think" by Joseph Nguyen

I was flabbergasted to hear this, because there's a german book with the very same title (albeit in german, of course) by the comedian Kurt Krömer about his own history of severe depression.

So I wondered who of them borrowed the other one's title, and it turns out both books were published in March 2022 only about two weeks apart. What a strange coincidence.
by xenadu02 | 2025-06-26 22:38:31+00:00
Because zero-size types exist which you might want to take the address of. Possibly as a result of macro substitution or templating mechanism that only appears in certain build configurations.

It means you don't need a bunch of special-case handling if one out of 27 types ends up with zero size in some situation. It just all works the same way. Especially the unique address part because that would be an annoying source of difficult to track bugs.
by evanelias | 2025-06-26 22:38:45+00:00
I just don't think that's realistic when the number of stakeholders grows too high. How do you accurately determine how much each county should pay? How do you allocate funding for commuters who live in one county but work in another?

When a transit agency serves the state's largest population center and economic center, it seems reasonable for its funding to be a state-level concern. Especially when it also serves other states, and additionally ~40% of the tracks used by SEPTA are owned by Amtrak, which is Federal. County-level officials are just not the best layer to interface with all that.
by v5v3 | 2025-06-26 22:40:21+00:00
British people are refusing to pay the licence fee.

And it's difficult for the government to make it compulsory, as that would be an admission that it has always been a state propaganda machine.

Some trivia: in the UK, by law, certain channels have to be at the first position on all TVs sold. With BBC taking channels 1 and 2.
by em-bee | 2025-06-26 22:40:22+00:00
germany is federated, and education is in the purview of each state. so every state in germany may have different rules. that too was done with the goal to prevent nationwide indoctrination. besides, you got what, 2 or at most 4 hours of that subject, and it obviously didn't work to indoctrinate you. i was sent to religion class too, expressly to learn about other religions because we are not christian. if you want real christian indoctrination then you need to go to a catholic school where christianity gets into every subject, and being in school is like being in a monastery. again, the point is to expose children to different viewpoints. being a primarily christian culture, having a class about christianity is only fair. although today i hope that in most regions the class is not limited to christianity but also covers other religions, as it did btw in the school i went to several decades ago. in 9th grade we had the choice between religion and ethics. i chose religion. and if it were up to me, i would make that mandatory, because religion is a big influence in our culture, and we need to learn about it. not teaching anything about religion would be like not teaching history.

the problem with alternative people is when they isolate themselves from the rest of society. people should have freedom to believe what they want, but they should not get the freedom to completely lock out outside influences. our society lives from the input of different cultures and viewpoints. if you are isolating yourself from everyone, that may be ok for you, as an adult, but it is not ok for your children. they should make their own choice on whether they want to follow you or not. and it's our responsibility as a society to offer those choices.

take the amish in the US for example. they have their own way, but they are not completely isolated. and as i understand it in youth at one point each youth gets to live one year outside and potentially make a choice. for german expectations that's probably not enough. we want full integration, so your different beliefs need to be strong enough that they can hold their own against the rest of society. if they aren't, and if you feel the need to protect your children from general society, then i would wager there is something wrong.

also from a parenting perspective, if your children don't want to follow you then you are doing parenting wrong. as the adage goes, it is pointless to raise your children in a certain way, they end up copying you anyways. meaning, if they don't copy you you must have messed up badly.
by zahlman | 2025-06-26 22:40:53+00:00
> Most of them have a single implementation.

None of them have a single implementation. It only took a few minutes to find all the following:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Java_implementations

* Go has gofrontend and GopherJS aside from the reference implementation

* Python has a whole slew of alternate implementations listed on the main Python web site: https://www.python.org/download/alternatives/

* C# has Mono, which actually implements the entire .NET framework

* Rust has Rust-GCC and gccrs
by AIPedant | 2025-06-26 22:41:38+00:00
It's hard to find reliable data but it seems most Switch 1 players (not just owners) are in the 20-30 demographic: https://www.shacknews.com/article/127542/nintendo-discloses-...

Although Nintendo is still clearly targeting families relative to XBox/Sony, the Switch itself has a lot of adult games (e.g. the Cyberpunk port).
by oskarkk | 2025-06-26 22:41:43+00:00
The way I understand it, they say that animals react better to danger coming from the left side, because the left visual field (of both eyes) is processed by the right hemisphere, which is dominant for threat processing and spatial attention. So, for the cat sleeping on the left side the danger will probably come from the left side of its visual field, while for cat sleeping on the right side it would come from the right side of the visual field. Therefore, sleeping on the left side is better, because the cat will react faster to something coming towards it.

Look at this picture to see how the image from both eyes is processed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_system#/media/File:Huma...

(this is for human visual system, but it's the same for a cat I guess?)

The important thing is not the left/right eye, but the left/right side of both eyes.
by walterbell | 2025-06-26 22:42:10+00:00
Three days to implement recent ruling?

2025-04-31, "Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856795

2025-05-02, "Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43867692

2025-06-04, "Court denies Apple appeal in Epic Games case, keeping App Store changes in place", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44186891
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-06-26 22:42:32+00:00
Rust compiler is very very fast but language has too many features.

The slowness is because everyone has to write code with generics and macros in Java Enterprise style in order to show they are smart with rust.

This is really sad to see but most libraries abuse codegen features really hard.

You have to write a lot of things manually if you want fast compilation in rust.

Compilation speed of code just doesn’t seem to be a priority in general with the community.