MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-06-06 22:35:38+00:00
WebAssembly is still a flavour of assembly. It's only nearly native performance to the real code because the interface to JavaScript has overhead. Every action in JavaScript incurs overhead due to dynamic types and objects, as well as dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection. Wasm can theoretically ignore it all and run as if it were compiled for the host system, except when it needs to interact with the JavaScript environment.

It's astonishing how fast JavaScript has become. But even if it were fully compiled, it would still be a language with higher overhead.

You can still write bad code, or compile a language with high overhead into WASM. This remains valuable for porting existing libraries into the browser and reducing bandwidth usage. But properly done with a fast compiled language like c or rust.... wasm can unlock some magical things into the web ecosystem.
by SCLeo | 2025-06-06 22:35:44+00:00
Yeah, the commonjs to esm transition has been the python 2 to python 3 transition of JavaScript, except the benefits are limited (at least compared to the hassle created).

There are many libraries that have switched to esm only (meaning they don't support commonjs), but even today, the best way to find the last commonjs version of those libraries is to go to the "versions" tab on npm, and find the most downloaded version in the last month, and chances are, that will be the last commonjs version.

Yes, in a vacuum, esm is objectively a better than commonjs, but how tc39 almost intentionally made it incompatible with commonjs (via top-level awaits) is just bizarre to me.
by weinerdiner | 2025-06-06 22:36:09+00:00
Hi everyone, I wanted to share something wholesome that I think you all might enjoy.

My physics teacher has been building this browser game called CategorIQ — he coded the whole thing himself after school, just as a personal project. It started as a small experiment for fun, but it’s grown into a pretty addicting game that a bunch of us now play daily.

He’s not great at marketing or promoting it (he’s a physics teacher, not a game dev!) so I told him I’d help get the word out a bit. I genuinely think more people would love this game if they found it.

Here’s how it works: You get 3 rounds per game Each round gives you a new letter You try to list 12 words that fit different categories, all starting with that letter There’s a timed mode and an untimed mode There’s a daily leaderboard — fun to compete with friends / players around the world

It’s free, there are no ads, and it works great on both desktop and mobile.

https://categoriq.xyz

It would mean a lot if you gave it a try — and if you have any feedback, he’d love to hear it. He’s still working on improving it every week.

Thanks so much for reading. I really want to see his little game reach more people!
Ask HN: What would you work on if you couldn't fail?
by rblion | 2025-06-06 22:36:35+00:00
I've been sprinting 10-16 hours a day for almost a month now. I feel cool, calm, and collected though.

A lot is happening in the world and in our industry but I am doing all I can to be part of the cure, not the cancer.

This gives me peace of mind and helps me adapt regardless of if YC backs me or not. I'm moving to Palo Alto regardless, just being in the zip code alone will be enough at this point.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-06 22:36:51+00:00
"If I type a shell command that's valuable - one that did something useful enough that I might want it again in future, and long and complicated enough that I'd be annoyed to have to figure it out a second time from scratch - then I can't rely on it just happening to be in my .bash_history. So instead I put it somewhere else: maybe a shell function in my .bashrc, or maybe a shell script in my directory of random useful scriptlets."

I have a folder marked executable with hundreds of small shell scripts, appended to $PATH. I never write long scripts. I sometimes write scripts that run other scripts but I try to avoid such dependencies. I do not use bash, I use NetBSD Almquist or modified Debian Almquist shell so all the scripts are highly portable. I can move a tarball of this folder from computer to computer, whether the OS is Linux or BSD. These scripts generally run faster than bash scripts.

It would be untenable to save all command line history since I spend every day in the shell in textmode (not x11) and only occasionally switch to a graphical environment. I sometimes use Almquist-based shells that have command line history removed. This forces me to write useful scripts.

A lot of cumulative shell knowledge is contained in that folder of scripts. These scripts have worked for decades unchanged. I think the Almquist shell may be my favourite interpreter. No matter what else I try I always come back to the shell language. There is something appealing about scripts that seem to work forever.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-06 22:37:21+00:00
It depends on the area of law but there's generally a balancing test as to whether or not a court should issue an injunction. There are a number of factors such as the likelihood that the plaintiff will succeed but also if the injunction (or lack thereof) causes permanent harm or can be reversed.

Imagine a court was considering the issue from years ago when Australian authorities were deciding to release the cane toad to kill sugar cane pests. That's not a decision taht you can take back. Once they're released, there's really no rolling that back. So a court would generally side on issuing an injunction pending an appeal for that very reason.

As a historical side note, the cane toad was released and it's been an ecological disaster ever since.

Now imagine another case where a government agency is requiring all fishing boats to install transponders and they're relatively cheap. There's reallly no irreversible harm either way so a court will tend to look instead at the likelihood of the plaintiff prevailing instead.

At least that's how it should work.

In practice, particularly with the Supreme Court through its entire history, there's a fairly accurate way of predicting how they'll rule: pick the side that favors the wealthy and powerful and that's how they'll rule way more often than not.

There are exceptions to this and it's not universal (eg decisions rolling back segregation) but it is (IMHO) arguably the best predictor.
by nomel | 2025-06-06 22:37:24+00:00
> Those two things really aren't the same at all

Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].

It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.

[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-132/issue-2/AUK-1...
by svara | 2025-06-06 22:37:40+00:00
Based on my exchange with wdaher, who seems to understand this well, it's a bit more subtle than that:

The salaries are of course expenses, but they are exactly offset by the value of the IP created by the R&D activities.

It's a bit as if you spent money on buying some materials. As long as the material doesn't degrade, the cash is gone but the value is the same and therefore won't reduce your taxes.

If that IP is amortized over a single year, it does not contribute to taxation, but it does if it is amortized over a longer period.
by slipnslider | 2025-06-06 22:37:49+00:00
Repealing SB174 has bipartisan support. The house already passed its repeal but it died in Senate because a separate took (that also repealed it) took its place but that separate bill stalled out.

174 is so small it can't go through both chambers on its own so it needs to get attached a larger bill like OBBA.

It's unfortunate because it appears both sides want this repealed to allow immediate amortization of domestic R&D expenses.

https://abgi-usa.com/section174/latest-and-greatest
by Brian_K_White | 2025-06-06 22:38:14+00:00
Why?

They say the physical properties are like polycarbonate: no problem there.

They don't say how fast it degrades in ideal conditions but do say it takes 4 months in poor conditions, and that it requires microbes not merely water, or oxygen or other chemistry or uv etc, but microbes: sounds like it won't be touched at all in your soda even after a week.

Where is the terrible part?
by samuelklam | 2025-06-06 22:38:30+00:00
PermitFlow (YC W22) | Staff, Fullstack & Frontend Software Engineers | New York, NY | ONSITE | Full-time | https://permitflow.com

PermitFlow’s mission is to streamline and simplify construction permitting in the $1.6 trillion United States construction market. Our software reduces time to permit, supporting permitting end-to-end including permit research, application preparation, submission, and monitoring.

We’ve raised a $31m Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Felicis Ventures, Altos Ventures, and the founders and executives from Zillow, PlanGrid, Thumbtack, Bluebeam, Uber, Procore, and more.

Permitting is a challenging yet interesting problem; thousands of municipalities across the United States have their own processes and requirements - many which are continually updating. Software, AI, and LLMs provide an exciting opportunity for us to reason at scale and distill a nuanced and localized permitting process into a standard and streamlined experience for our customers.

We're looking for customer-obsessed, ambitious, and hard-working teammates who are excited about solving a real-world problem with technology at its helm.

NYC Onsite Roles | apply at: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/permitflow?departmentId=d33195eb-89...

1. Staff Software Engineer - $200K-275K + equity

2. Fullstack Software Engineer - $125-240K + equity

3. Senior Frontend Engineer - $125K-240K + equity

https://permitflow.com/hiring
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 22:38:58+00:00
> But you haven't gained...

Yes, you have. You have an asset of greater value which you can leverage in a number of ways without liquidating it and "realizing" the gains. That's a real gain, with real value.

> you could be taxed over and over again

Only if you make new unrealized gains.

> and if the stick drops or hits zero then what?

Then you have a negative unrealized gain, or, equivalently, an unrealized loss. If you are taxing unrealized gains instead of taxing gains when realized, then the natural assumption would be, just as is done with taxing gains at realization, that negative unrealized gains are either offset against current income or against future unrealized gains, and so effectively create (considered on their own) negative (current or future) taxes. The simplest form of this is to offset only against future gains, by the simple mechanism that when gains are recognized for tax purposes, they adjust the basis value of the asset, and when unrealized losses occur, they don't effect the basis value at all, so you don't have a taxable unrealized gain again until the market value exceeds the basis value established at the prior peak.

More complex versions would allow you to offset some or all of the unrealized loss from the prior basis value against current income of other forms, but the amount of that offset would reduce the basis value of the asset.
by ryoshoe | 2025-06-06 22:39:05+00:00
>Also, online providers maintain lists of self-excluded people with state regulators (to be clear, the state holds the list, people put themselves on the list and are banned everywhere).

There's and ongoing lawsuit alleging sports betting platforms sent promotions targeted to users on the exclusion list to encourage a relapse in their gambling addiction.

https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/44520842/baltim...
by ramoz | 2025-06-06 22:39:08+00:00
Also, I have a capability I'm sure is 100x the OP link. I've explored this space a bit.

https://streamable.com/k5iny8 (2day expiry)

Pretty much any character or animation.

I don't feel compelled to share unless anyone in the relevant industry wants to collab, in favor of supporting human artists.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-06-06 22:39:17+00:00
Okay...but they are still alive? Poland has tens of thousands drug and alcohol-induced deaths, you can lose your money doing anything: gambling, women, bad business, job loss, etc. Many, many more people will have lost all their money because of alcohol in Poland than gambling...you only care about one of these things. The only explanation is that you care about people losing money in ways you don't approve of.
by layla5alive | 2025-06-06 22:39:44+00:00
In terms of FLOPS, Ryzen is ~1,000,000 times faster than a 486.

For serial branchy code, it isn't a million times faster, but that has almost nothing to do with legacy and everything to do with the nature of serial code and that you can't linearly improve serial execution with architecture and transistor counts (you can sublinearly improve it), but rather with Denard scaling.

It is worth noting, though, that purely via Denard scaling, Ryzen is already >100x faster, though! And via architecture (those transistors) it is several multiples beyond that.

In general compute, if you could clock it down at 33 or 66MHz, a Ryzen would be much faster than a 486, due to using those transistors for ILP (instruction-level parallelism) and TLP (thread-level parallelism). But you won't see any TLP in a single serial program that a 486 would have been running, and you won't get any of the SIMD benefits either, so you won't get anywhere near that in practice on 486 code.

The key to contemporary high performance computing is having more independent work to do, and organizing the data/work to expose the independence to the software/hardware.
by mindwork | 2025-06-06 22:40:37+00:00
It's just a job.

I'm not sure why one would put the weight of the impact of your work on yourself. You've been trained to do certain job, you've been hired to do the job, and you are doing it. You can have moral quarrels with the company mission(like working for defense), but you can't change the whole industry's direction.

Do people who invented printing press and made all the scribes obsolete need to think about their impact on the world? Does inventors of the car who put all horses out of work need to think about their impact? Does people who invented atomic bomb need to put a weight of the devastation that it brought on their chest? All those things have 2 sides, it improved life in one way and worsened it in others.

Professional deformation - is when you treat everything in life as a puzzle that needs to be solved. And when you switch your focus from engineering to societal problems and try to solve that, unfortunately it's not working like that. Sometimes life is just a chaos and it's not your or anyone else fault.

It's just a job.
by jajko | 2025-06-06 22:41:16+00:00
Those are just empty names russian tv is making up to amuse less bright part of population. Its just another war, has been since 2014, nothing more and nothing less.

Lets not forget in first hours of 2022 invasion there were numerous hunting squads deployed in Kyiv with explicit orders and training to execute all Ukraine's high command, including Zelensky and all his family, and cause chaos on civilian and military infrastructure. There are numerous videos how those guys failed, were caught and mostly executed since they expected a very different situation on the ground (which is valid even as per Geneva convention, as non-marked combatants behind enemy lines would often face). One of many FSB and GRU's failures.

If we want to talk about terrorism, list of items on russian side is very, very long and new items are added every day. As I said, empty words and all know it. The closer you look at russia these days at all levels the more similarities with nazi Germany you will find. History really keeps repeating itself with sometimes stunning precision.
by viraptor | 2025-06-06 22:42:53+00:00
> That's not how security clearances work.

Not sure what you meant by that. Even if you get the clearance of some level, it doesn't mean you get immediate access to everything you want. There are still limits on what work you're actually given.

> Neither do the people we're talking about.

In theory they don't. But then you get the recent story about the terrible AI document review that resulted in real actions. There's so little control that by stupid actions they ended up effectively making decisions. They literally got banned from working on some information without a supervisor because they were so reckless.
by bitwize | 2025-06-06 22:43:37+00:00
Smalltalk's left arrow is actually _. Before ASCII was fully standardized to what we know today, ^ was ↑ and _ was ←. This is visible in some later character sets, like PETSCII and the fonts used for Smalltalk. In Smalltalk, you can still type 'a _ foo' and it will assign foo to a.
by spinach | 2025-06-06 22:44:07+00:00
I'm not sure where you consensus is coming from but AI art is getting really, really good. I used to be able to easily tell what was AI art when others couldn't but that's changing fast.

It's been trained on some of the best artwork. Various artists have been told their artwork looks like AI, meanwhile it's actually the other around. Already in the app stores there are many games full of AI art that the average person without an artist's eye probably can't see the difference compared to something a human made.

I think art is very different from other jobs, it's more like the soul of humanity. When we look back through time, we mainly look at the art and what it can tell us, only a niche portion of people will care about the other things.

If we let machines do everything, even create our culture and art, what is left for us? Just to be consumers?
by blacklion | 2025-06-06 22:44:15+00:00
> Even on a local network, you should probably not be sending e.g. passwords around in plaintext.

Why not? There is only me, my wife and my cat. Guests has separate network, of course :) If my network is compromised I have much bigger problems than password to video collection.

> Let's encrypt is a solution for someone who's tech-savvy enoug to set it up, not the average user.

caddy (web server) can provision Let's Encrypt cert transparently for user. I don't say Plex user should install caddy, but Plex server can have same mechanism built-in. If user is tech-savvy enough to install Plex.

> And not just desktop app, but mobile app as well

To be good they should have completely different structure and screen layouts for Mobile and Desktop no matter which "toolkit" is used, though — different screen sizes, different screen orientation, different input devices (touch and mouse are VERY different in UX and decent Desktop UI needs good keyboard controls, OH WAI~~~)...
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-06 22:45:08+00:00
I have an app that's been running an O n^2 algorithm in "production" (free open source app used by various communities) for about half a year now.

It's been fine because "n" is "number of aircraft flying in this flight simulator" - and the simulator's engine starts to fail above around 2000 anyway. So even in the worst case it's still going to run within milliseconds.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-06-06 22:45:41+00:00
<< When has policing nazi speech ever led to authoritarianism?

Heh. You know what. I will let you figure it out on your own. I am ok with waiting.

<< Because neither claim is true.

I claim neither though. What I do claim, however, is that playing that game of whack-a-mole is not only a waste of time, but actually counter-productive. You may be able to pat yourself on the pack and quote paradox of intolerance at people until cows come home, but it won't change that simple reality. And I am ok with that too. Not that long ago, I was a little more annoyed with people devoting their limited lifespans unto that goal. Now I know better.

<< An authoritarian government won't care about what your constitution says.

Correct.

<< We have to take measures to stop wannabe dictators from getting power,

With you so far.

<< as that is the only protection of your free speech

Honestly, I have realized that no one is actually going to stop me from saying what I want to say.

<< Why respect the free speech of nazis

Because, friend, in the words of one supreme court justice ( and ,I might add, opinion of a fair part of the legal community ) is that it typically is not nice people or nice speech that needs protecting. It is the assholes and the 'bad' speech. But just because they are assholes and 'bad' speech, does not make the rights not apply. Do you understand why?

If not, allow me to spell it out for you, because I do feel charitable today. It is because by undermining asshole speech, you undermine your own.

<< who would send you to a death camp the second they're able to

You do realize this is not a great argument right? You are supposed to be held to a higher standard. Just because an idiot does idiot things does not give you a license to be an idiot.

<< Well, yeah. The question is what we set the law to be.

You tell me what you think is right. Clearly, it seems you don't like US version of legal speech already.
by throw0101c | 2025-06-06 22:45:43+00:00
> Note that almost every exchange outside the US has been flat or negative for decades.

And the US itself was flat for over a decade, with the only thing saving a domestic investor's returns being bonds:

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010/12/17/the-lost-de...

And as a Canadian, there are different sectors that would have given me positive gains over the years (I generally own mostly VEQT, a globally-diversified ETF):

* https://stingyinvestor.com/SC/PeriodicTableofAnnualReturns.p...

And it's perhaps looking more closely at what specifically about the US has been positive:

> Looking at this data, there are two distinct periods of extended U.S. outperformance—the late 1990s and today. And what do these two periods have in common? The rise of U.S. technology stocks. Bespoke Investment Group recently created this chart illustrating this phenomenon:

> Now that the U.S. technology sector makes up over 30% of the S&P 500 (as it did back in 2000), this begs the question: Is U.S. outperformance just a technological fad?

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/do-you-need-to-own-internationa...

Outside of tech, how much better is the general US market than any other market?
by pedalpete | 2025-06-06 22:48:01+00:00
Though I agree mostly with your sentiments, I'll play devils advocate a bit.

Why would autonomous vehicles be treated any differently then human operated vehicles?

The article unfortunately does not say what data is being required to be made public, but it does suggest that it is proprietary information, not specifically all information.

Crash information, I believe, is public information anyway. Perhaps not the intimate details of each crash, but the location, speed, etc, for both human and autonomous vehicles is (or should be) publicly available. There are definitely datasets for crash incidents, and there are rules regarding reporting of crashes in autonomous vehicles, which Cruise (I believe) failed to abide by and eventually led to GM shutting it down.

If the details were around the methods Tesla is using to assign robotaxis to certain areas and manage charge levels, should that be public knowledge if they have some special proprietary algorithms they feel are valuable?