MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bloomca | 2025-06-24 20:18:03+00:00
You can get a VPS in any cloud provider and treat it as your server, just copy files to it. It depends on the scope of your projects, though, if you need a lot of resources it can get pretty pricey for just toy projects.

I pay $12 for a server on Digital Ocean, and I host multiple servers behind an Nginx. But I am primarily a frontend/Desktop developer, so they are simple.
by airforce1 | 2025-06-24 20:18:29+00:00
> What reason does this guy have to lie?

It might not be 100% lies, it might be "based on a true story". The temptation to embellish/frame yourself as the faultless protagonist is instinctive and there are hundreds of examples of people doing it. Narrative shifts are super common in cases where facts are initially sparse and then more come to light... we don't have the whole context.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-06-24 20:18:37+00:00
I agree, but I don't think it's entirely unique to this era.

The US Navy's torpedo station in Newport, RI produced torpedos that were really prone to failure during the first few years of WW2.

IIRC, the problem persisted so long because an admiral in charge refused to provide enough torpedos for adequate testing.

(Sorry if there are any errors here, I can't easily fact check at the moment.)
Show HN: I built an AI thumbnail generator for YouTubers who can't design
by isacbuilds | 2025-06-24 20:18:57+00:00
I've been wanting to start a YouTube channel for years but kept putting it off because I can't make decent thumbnails and hiring designers is too expensive for me.

So I built thumbo.io - upload a photo + text prompt and get studio-quality YouTube thumbnails in ~60 seconds. No design skills needed.

If you're able to try it, I have a coupon code "HN100" for the first 5 people who want to try it free (I wish I could give more, budget is tight).

I'd really appreciate any feedback on the product, UX, pricing, or anything else. Thanks!
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-24 20:21:07+00:00
If you were going to do that you wouldn’t waste energy breaking the rock to begin with. I highly doubt it’s feasible to time things that accurately and even if you could there is a lot of mountain in the way to soak up the energy.

The depth assumptions for the facility are often with a shallow gradient roads for the entrance and exits, but there is no need for the gradient to be shallow.
by sleepyguy | 2025-06-24 20:21:17+00:00
It may not have set it back at all. The discussion in different circles has suggested that Iran was able to remove enough enriched uranium to create several bombs. It possibly makes sense considering that the enrichment facilities were a target, and why keep any enriched uranium there.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/politics/intel-assessment-us-...
by kunzhi | 2025-06-24 20:21:28+00:00
Interesting article, I'll admit when I first saw the title I was thinking of a different kind of "scaling" - namely the client/server decoupling in X11.

I still think X11 forwarding over SSH is a super cool and unsung/undersung feature. I know there are plenty of good reasons we don't really "do it these days" but I have had some good experiences where running the UI of a server app locally was useful. (Okay, it was more fun than useful, but it was useful.)
by jahewson | 2025-06-24 20:21:37+00:00
That people over-estimate the size of minority groups is a well known research finding [1]

As for the 53% stat, dude just go to Walmart and talk to regular people [2]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-think-mino...

[2] https://youtube.com/shorts/e8s9-Qnx-_0?feature=shared
by forty | 2025-06-24 20:22:11+00:00
Since 2019, I replaced once the battery of my FP3.

I often see people with broken screens. USB ports can get damaged by too many plug cycles etc. None of these reason should justify buying a new phone, but in practice if replacing the part is not relatively cheap and straightforward, this is what happens.

And yes upgrade can be cool too but much harder and probably unrealistic for a small company like this one. Look at how well it works for PC, after 10 years you have to still change everything to upgrade anything (your new CPU socket forces you to change the mother board, and the CPU fan, then your old ram is not compatible, etc and at the end you keep the case and maybe the PSU. And this is on a relatively open ecosystem compared to the mobile world with their SoC/SoM, high space constraints and a single supported kernel etc...)
by nemomarx | 2025-06-24 20:22:33+00:00
If you were around for the last bush terms you'll know that anti war media is going to be restricted to small circulation news papers and blogs. Any large TV channel will follow the white house on this kind of thing, with varying flavors of reluctance about the necessity of it or exaggeration of the threat posed by WMDs, etc.

Try small news sites on the scale of 404media or social media commentators you trust, I guess.
by abanana | 2025-06-24 20:22:58+00:00
> The fix back then was to bake your GPU in the oven for a while

Oh that brings back bad memories! We were running a LAN centre, and our 7900GT graphics cards were failing left and right. We bought 23 8800GTS cards to replace/upgrade the lot. After a year or so they all started failing too. Reflowing, i.e. baking in a cheap little electric oven in the staff room, would give them an extra 6 months or so of life. After each subsequent baking, it would last less time than the previous. Having to replace so many graphics cards, after a much shorter that expected lifespan, was a lot of money for a tiny business. (Having said that, looking at how much it would cost now, I shouldn't complain.)

I read at the time that it was because of microscopic cracks in the solder, but hadn't realised before now that it was due to the removal of lead. We had no further problems after switching to AMD, but I never knew whether it was really an NVidia problem, or just those models, etc.

The GeForce FX 5900XTs, from the 2004 PCs (before the article's 2006 date of the start of the problem), were still working fine 10 years later, albeit in old PCs used for just web access and the occasional game of Bejeweled.
by doctoboggan | 2025-06-24 20:23:01+00:00
There has been a flurry of `uv` posts on HN recently. I don't have any experience with it, is it really the future, or is it a fad?

As Ive gotten older I've grown weary of third party tools, and almost always try to stick with the first party built in methods for a given task.

Does uv provide enough benefit to make me reconsider?
by perihelions | 2025-06-24 20:23:04+00:00
> "“The ceasefire came without either Israel or the United States being able to destroy several key underground nuclear facilities, including near Natanz, Isfahan and Parchin,” Lewis said,

Here's more about these (not-widely-discussed) additional underground sites from Professor Lewis,

https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3l...
by bigyabai | 2025-06-24 20:23:19+00:00
1. The Pentagon still hasn't found Saddam's WMDs.

2. Eyes in the sky don't tell you much about the damage done to an underground base.

3. Iran had advance notice of the strikes and presumably had a window of opportunity to move any enriched uranium.

4. Iran's centrifuges are domestically made, and they have thousands stashed in storage due to IAEA limits.

5. There was actually that one time where the New York Times leaked Pentagon secrets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
by joe_the_user | 2025-06-24 20:23:31+00:00
I just got back from a week-long vacation where I flew Southwest. It was my first Southwest flight in a while and I will now not fly any other airlines.

The rise of "basic economy" seems a lot like the general phenomena of "enshitification" and has a similar motive - degrade your product to squeeze the last drop out of the consumer. And it seems logical that charging by the "degree of shit" in a product means every level is going to be shit actually.
by breadwinner | 2025-06-24 20:23:32+00:00
Microsoft has wasted their opportunity.

When ChatGPT first came out, Satya and Microsoft were seen as visionaries for their wisdom in investing in Open AI. Then competitors caught up while Microsoft stood still. Their integration with ChatGPT produced poor results [1] reminding people of Tay [2]. Bing failed to capitalize on AI, while Proclarity showed what an AI-powered search engine should really look like. Copilot failed to live up to its promise. Then Claude.ai, Gemini 2.0 caught up with or exceeded ChatGPT, and Microsoft still doesn't have their own model.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
by f38zf5vdt | 2025-06-24 20:23:36+00:00
I think the author is right about AI only accelerating to the next frontier when AI takes over AI research. If the timelines are correct and that happens in the next few years, the widely desired job of AI researcher may not even exist by then -- it'll all be a machine-based research feedback loop where humans only hinder the process.

Every other intellectual job will presumably be gone by then too. Maybe AI will be the second great equalizer, after death.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-06-24 20:23:56+00:00
OpenAI Deep Research is great for this. Here's a report about College Hill, a small area of SF between Bernal Heights and Glen Park:

https://chatgpt.com/share/685b0890-fa44-8013-adce-8db2855d13...

(Glen Park Library is where Ross Ulbricht was arrested.)

Here's a similar one about Colliers Wood (South London), another small area whose location is often described as 'between X and Y' (in this case, Tooting and Wimbledon):

https://chatgpt.com/share/685b09a4-14f0-8013-ad2c-3c2c7f8c25...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-24 20:24:44+00:00
> broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation

I'm not so sure about this one. In particular, presuming that it is found that models which can produce infringing material are themselves infringing material, the ability to distill models from older models seems to suggest that the older models can actually produce the new, infringing model. It seems like that should mean that all output from the older model is infringing because any and all of it can be used to make infringing material (the new model, distilled from the old).

I don't think it's really tenable for courts to treat any model as though it is, in itself, copyright-infringing material without treating every generative model like that and, thus, killing the GPT/diffusion generation business (that could happen but it seems very unlikely). They will probably stick to being critical of what people generate with them and/or how they distribute what they generate.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-06-24 20:24:54+00:00
Oh interesting about the parchment, I had heard once that it was silicone-coated paper and never verified that. It seems like it mostly still is.

At one point (my original training & first career was as a cook) I got interested in what was used before modern culinary parchment paper, which I'm sure you know is pretty new and totally unrelated to what was called parchment historically.

Seems like the answer was a huge array of per-application techniques though, with wax paper being the most similar to parchment but obviously not appropriate for a lot of things. Sometimes a layer of beeswax was used directly, melted into the pan and cooled; a lot of things that will absorb oil and stick don't do that with wax. Though others will stick to the wax and then it's a mess. Like I said per-application.

I believe cheesecake is a pretty new food but there are some similar/related dishes in slavic & french food traditions. For crustless custards the french moves have mostly been to just cut it out of the pan and then clean up the sides in a separate step. Either smoothing with a hot knife, or by applying some other intentional rough texture like crosshatching, or coating it in ganache or piped pastry cream or something to hide the damage.

For the slavic moulded easter cheeses (pashka) they lay wet cheesecloth into the pan first and the final food just has that texture on it along with the moulded pattern. Though those aren't baked, but some modern cheesecakes aren't baked either. I have also known pastry cooks that just ran the crust all the way up the side of the pan. Not quite the standard move and it changes the crust:filling ratio by quite a bit but it's not freakish either.

Sorry if this is an unwanted info dump, it's an interesting subject that I've also spent some time on in various ways over the years.
by machinehum | 2025-06-24 20:25:05+00:00
I actually disagree.

We have lower power bare metal systems, think AVR/STM stuff (in the 1Mhz to 50Mhz range with 128K or less of RAM) here FreeRTOS, no freeRTOS, custom driver code and some basic application code makes sense. For simple to very complex systems.

Then there's 1Ghz+ stuff with an MMU and 2GB+ RAM. Linux makes sense here.

Companies are now making chips 200Mhz+, 4MB RAM, with no MMU. This is precisely where Zephyr excels, you want a full networking stack? Switch that on. A file system, easy. Driver for some more complex thing? Maybe an SDIO radio? boomboom
by riskable | 2025-06-24 20:25:05+00:00
A judge already ruled that models themselves don't constitute copyright infringement in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (https://casetext.com/case/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc). The EFF has a good summary about it:

> the court dismissed “nonsensical” claims that Meta’s LLaMA models are themselves infringing derivative works.

See: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/copyright-and-ai-cases...
by smartaz42 | 2025-06-24 20:25:30+00:00
For me, one of the enjoyable aspects of toy projects is that there is no schedule to meet. Which means that I can take my time. And yes, that means I take much more time than the article implies. As an examine, I've been polishing my PEG-based Turing complete language (which features both AOT-to-C and a fully featured repl) since COVID was a daily aspect of life.
by sambaumann | 2025-06-24 20:25:48+00:00
Between yesterday's thread and this thread I decided to finally give uv a shot today - I'm impressed, both by the speed and how easy it is to manage dependencies for a project.

I think their docs could use a little bit of work, especially there should be a defined path to switch from a requirements.txt based workflow to uv. Also I felt like it's a little confusing how to define a python version for a specific project (it's defined in both .python-version and pyproject.toml)
by bigyabai | 2025-06-24 20:26:23+00:00
There have been multiple ADS-B reports in the last week of cargo planes transiting to and from China to Iran. It's entirely possible that Tehran is stocking up on air defenses in exchange for the bulk amounts of oil China imports.

PL-10Es and J-10s aren't terribly expensive. If Iran's in it for the long-haul, they've still got options on the table.
by jlowin | 2025-06-24 20:26:25+00:00
FastMCP author here -- (maybe surprisingly) I agree with many of the observations here.

FastMCP exists because I found the original spec and SDK confusing and complicated. It continues to exist because it turns out there's great utility in curating an agent-native API, especially when so many great dev tools have adopted this client interface.

But the spec is still so young and at such risk of being co-opted by hype (positive and negative). I would invite everyone to participate constructively in improving it.

Lastly: this article is plainly AI generated, as `from mcp import tool` is completely hallucinated. Just some food for thought for the "AI should be able to figure out my complex REST API" crowd that seems well represented here.
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-24 20:27:09+00:00
I'm an advocate for creating codes to solve problems. I've literally written a terminal emulator with that in mind: https://github.com/lmorg/ttyphoon -- there I defined codes for graphical features like interactive tables and inlining AI elements in non-intrusive ways.

My qualm isn't with defining new escape sequences. It's:

1. calling Kitty's specific double height/width escape sequences "modern" when it's using the same 1970s principles as the original double height/width codes.

2. Kitty reinventing the wheel here when it adds no benefit to the original codes.

It's the same reason I get annoyed that there are 4+ different proprietary codes for inlining images.

All of this continual reinvention of the same ideas just creates more problems than it solves.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-24 20:27:47+00:00
> Packaging, dependency management, and reproducibility in shell land are still stuck in the Stone Ages.

IMO it should stay that way, because any script that needs those things is way past the point where shell is a reasonable choice. Shell scripts should be small, 20 lines or so. The language just plain sucks too much to make it worth using for anything bigger.
by toast0 | 2025-06-24 20:27:51+00:00
Fake frames have a big latency penalty, because you can't generate a frame between X and Y until you have Y. At the point that you have generated frame Y, however many frames you insert give you that much additional latency, beyond whatever your display adds.

I guess I can see some utility in situations where latency is not a major factor, but IMHO, that pushes out most gaming.
by chasd00 | 2025-06-24 20:28:18+00:00
Many people who live in those towns you describe work in McKinney, Plano and other parts of the suburbs. I’m not saying you’re wrong because there certainly are those people that make those commutes. I personally know a dev who lives in Prosper and another who lives in Melissa and they both commute to Las Colinas! Their reasoning was home affordability, home value growth, and school quality.
by martin-t | 2025-06-24 20:28:41+00:00
Copyright was codified in an age where plagiarism was time consuming. Even replacing words with synonyms on a mass scale was technically infeasible.

The goal of copyright is to make sure people can get fair compensation for the amount of work they put in. LLMs automate plagiarism on a previously unfathomable scale.

If humans spend a trillion hours writing books, articles, blog posts and code, then somebody (a small group of people) comes and spends a million hours building a machine that ingests all the previous work and produces output based on it, who should get the reward for the work put in?

The original authors together spent a million times more effort (normalized for skill) and should therefore should get a million times bigger reward than those who build the machine.

In other words, if the small group sells access to the product of the combined effort, they only deserve a millionth of the income.

---

If "AI" is as transformative as they claim, they will have no trouble making so much money they they can fairly compensate the original authors while still earning a decent profit. But if it's not, then it's just an overpriced plagiarism automator and their reluctance to acknowledge they are making money on top of everyone else's work is indicative.
by heikkilevanto | 2025-06-24 20:28:42+00:00
The first example in the article, a regex engine, clicked for me. I had read the book on beautiful code #, and the first short story was about a regex thing by none other than Dennis Ritchie. As Fate would have it, my job required me to make a tool for web scraping. Inspired by that book I created a pattern matching language for dom trees. And a click and point tool to create those patterns. At the best time or company had a full time person maintaining maybe 10k patterns to scrape days from library catalogs... It was not a toy project, but it did feel like, even if I got paid to do it.

# Andy Oran, Greg Wilson: "Beautiful code"
by deepakjois | 2025-06-24 20:28:54+00:00
uvx is useful to run scripts inside PyPi packages. It does not support running Python scripts directly

You can use uvx run scripts with a combination of the --with flag to specify the dependencies and invoking python directly. For e.g

uvx --with youtube-transcript-api python transcript.py

But you wont get the benefit of PEP 723 metadata.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-24 20:29:08+00:00
> None of these reason should justify buying a new phone, but in practice if replacing the part is not relatively cheap and straightforward, this is what happens.

The reason that is what happens is that you can't upgrade the old phone. But you have to upgrade the phone anyway, so you take advantage of the only way to do that, buying a new phone.

I wasn't upset when I smashed my phone screen recently, because that phone already needed to be replaced for other reasons.
by krackers | 2025-06-24 20:29:20+00:00
GPT-2 can successfully learn to do multiplication using the standard tokenizer though, using "Implicit CoT with Stepwise Internalization".

https://twitter.com/yuntiandeng/status/1836114401213989366

If anything I'd think this indicates the barrier isn't tokenization (if it can do arithmetic, it can probably count as well) but something to do with "sequential dependencies" requiring use of COT and explicit training. Which still leaves me puzzled: there are tons of papers showing that variants of GPT-2 trained in the right way can do arithmetic, where are the papers solving the "count R in strawberry" problem?
by nemomarx | 2025-06-24 20:29:37+00:00
I think it's kinda race to the bottom / lemons market. A lot of people search for flights through aggregators so you need to optimize for the price shown there, and the customer doesn't know if that's the real price or if there'll be add ons so they won't go for a more expensive one on faith.

Best bet is finding out which airline treats you best and going all the way to a loyalty card with them or something I guess? that seems to work out a little better
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-06-24 20:29:39+00:00
It's made it so that relatively poor people can afford to regularly fly all over the world, which is a relatively new thing.

Lowe middle income people in lower middle income countries can afford to fly somewhat regularly, and even internationally, too.

Flying used to be just for the rich only as far back as the 60s, and for nobody as far back as 200 years...
by QuesnayJr | 2025-06-24 20:30:20+00:00
I'm starting to think that half the commenters here don't actually know what "The Bitter Lesson" is. It's purely a statement about the history of AI research, in a very short essay by Rich Sutton: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html It's not some general statement about software engineering for all domains, but a very specific statement about AI applications. It's an observation that the previous generation's careful algorithmic work to solve an AI problem ends up being obsoleted by this generation's brute force approach using more computing power. It's something that's happened over and over again in AI, and has happened several times even since 2019 when Sutton wrote the essay.
by Retric | 2025-06-24 20:30:34+00:00
Half of that is inflation. Most of what remains is the anomaly in housing prices in 2009 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

Inflation adjusted median US home prices Q4 2024 where 419,300 vs Q4 2006 ~382,00 that isn’t flat but the difference is far less interesting.
by djoldman | 2025-06-24 20:30:49+00:00
It appears that taking advantage of human imperfections and irrationality are taking up more and more of companies' strategies and time.

You've got folks thinking constantly about advertising, pricing strategies, dark patterns, network effects that prevent or discourage churn, etc., in ways that tend to exploit flaws in the consumer's decisioning process or gaps in their knowledge, to the consumer's disadvantage.

It feels rare to see an actual new valuable product or improvement.