MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by h2zizzle | 2025-07-30 19:01:23+00:00
Hype is the product, and what it's the product of is a wealth imbalance that forces capital into (and I apologize in advance for the ire this characterization is likely to cause) Stupid Boomer Things. That is, the way the oldest and wealthiest Americans want to live and/or what they think will make them the most money.

Poor old people don't like this kind of change because it has historically come at their expense. Young people don't like this new tech because they recognize it (to varying degrees of correctness) as pulling up the ladder on entry-level positions, decimating the social and knowledge landscape (particularly the treacherous, abyssal seas that used to be the World Wide Web), amd drawing capital away from green tech and social investment and into climate change-exacerbating energy usage and construction. But they don't have the capital to dictate investment decisions, so no one cares.

I don't think this changes without some sort of economic "catastrophe" that redistributes wealth fast enough that the current arbiters can't get their legs back under themselves in time to prevent it. That's why you keep seeing all of these weird and novel tactics to forestall even the hint of a recession, and why so many young people are practically begging for, say, a repeat of 2008.

Edit: Also, I really like this site's layout on my phone. It feels fresh and performant.
by toddmorey | 2025-07-30 19:02:23+00:00
"The vulnerability we discovered was remarkably simple to exploit - by providing only a non-secret app_id value to undocumented registration and email verification endpoints." So you could sign yourself up as editor / collaborator on any app once you knew the app's ID.

Jeez, that's sloppy. My colleague in 2000 discovered you could browse any account on his bank's website by just changing the (sequential!) account IDs in the URL. In a lot of ways we've made great strides in security over the last 25 years... and in many ways, we haven't.
by apothegm | 2025-07-30 19:02:30+00:00
I was taught in C. Over 20 years ago. I’m massively faster in Python, and have been since about 6 weeks after I picked it up.

It sounds to me like part of that for you is about familiarity and another part might be about the specific problems you’re solving.

I’m usually working on solving problems at much higher levels of abstraction than string processing algorithms. For me, a big part of Python’s productivity is its ecosystem of useful abstractions (there’s an XKCD for that). And not having to worry about memory management or null pointers. How powerful exception handling is. Etc.

Python may in some ways be a more complex language, but I find it much simpler to reason about.
by cjensen | 2025-07-30 19:02:56+00:00
This is good stuff to have "in the toolbox," however habitually organizing structs this way is premature optimization. Much better to sensibly organize the fields and ignore alignment entirely unless you have a really good reason to do this. Good reasons could be that you know you will create a lot of these objects, or it has become a performance issue due to cache misses this would improve.
by nottorp | 2025-07-30 19:03:24+00:00
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience

Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.

What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-30 19:03:25+00:00
My personal predictions:

#1: Don't expect to see it until after AMD or someone else makes a product that actually manages to compete against Nvidia. Nvidia is pretty hostile to not running their low-level software stack, and Oxide is all about the legacy of Solaris.

#2: AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge into chiplets in one package.

#3: AMD MI400 and such AI accelerators will be primarily sold as full racks with its own custom "networking" (UALink switch), and the actual host CPU on those devices will be lower specs and mostly relegated to setup and metrics of the AI work, much like storage and networking appliances are built, AI workload will not even pass through the host CPU. I'm not sure Oxide can compete in that world. The "business logic CPUs" will reside in a different rack.
by izzydata | 2025-07-30 19:03:25+00:00
That may be an issue of going from a CRT tv to an LCD tv. As far as I am aware there was no software manipulation of the video input on a CRT. It just took the input and displayed it on the screen in the only way it could. Newer tvs have all kinds of settings to alter the video which takes processing time. They also typically have a game mode to turn off as much of it as it will allow.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-30 19:03:30+00:00
Most people don't make a difference between raw and pasteurized milk when drinking it. I tasted raw milk and I don't think I can. Obviously, you need to compare the same quality of milk, full fat is going to taste different than skimmed.

Raw milk cheese is different. Most people can taste the difference between raw milk cheese and pasteurized. It doesn't mean that they prefer the raw milk version though. Raw milk cheese usually have more diverse and intense flavors, but it can also mean more off-flavors and inconsistencies. For me that's what makes it interesting, so, raw milk cheese all the way!

Of course, raw milk and raw milk products are more expensive, and food safety has a lot to do with it. With raw milk, you have to work quickly and with stricter quality control.
by CM30 | 2025-07-30 19:03:39+00:00
Oh, I remember a lot of developers hated Flash back in the olden days, especially those that focused their efforts on usability or who wanted to advance web standards. Case in point:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flash-99-percent-bad/

Heck, I'm sure at least some people celebrated when Adobe pulled support for Flash, just like some people probably would now if the likes of React went away forever.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-30 19:03:47+00:00
> LLMs are Markov Chains on steroids?

It's not an unreasonable view, at least for decoder-only LLMs (which is what most popular LLMs are). While it may seem they violate the Markov property since they clearly do make use of their history, in practice that entire history is summarized in an embedding passed into the decoder. I.e.just like a Markov chain their entire history is compressed into a single point which leaves them conditionally independent of their past given their present state.

It's worth noting that this claim is NOT generally applicable to LLMs since both encoder/decoder and encoder-only LLMs do violate the Markov property and therefore cannot be properly considered Markov chains in a meaningful way.

But running inference on decoder only model is, at a high enough level of abstraction, is conceptually the same as running a Markov chain (on steroids).
by kentonv | 2025-07-30 19:03:49+00:00
Not necessarily.

Cap'n Proto serialization can be a huge win in terms of compute if you are communicating using shared memory or reading huge mmaped files, especially if the reader only cares to read some random subset of the message but not the whole thing.

But in the common use case of sending messages over a network, Cap'n Proto probably isn't a huge difference. Pushing the message through a socket is still O(n), and the benefits of compression might outweigh the CPU cost. (Though at least with Cap'n Proto, you have the option to skip compression. Most formats have some amount of compression baked into the serialization itself.)

Note that benchmarks vary wildly depending on the use case and the type of data being sent, so it's not really possible to say "Well it's N% faster"... it really depends. Sometimes Protobuf wins! You have to test your use case. But most people don't have time to build their code both ways to compare.

I actually think Cap'n Proto's biggest wins are in the RPC system, not the serialization. But these wins are much harder to explain, because it's not about speed, but instead expressiveness. It's really hard to understand the benefits of using a more expressive language until you've really tried it.

(I'm the author of Cap'n Proto.)
by 9rx | 2025-07-30 19:04:11+00:00
> And passing pointers to strings rather than strings, hmmm.

Are you referring to the "URL" example? That isn't a case of passing pointers to strings, that is passing a URL (fmt.Stringer) where the String method has a pointer receiver.

To demonstrate why the pointer would be needed in that case, consider:

type URL struct{} func (*URL) String() string { return "https://..." } func print(v any) { fmt.Println(v.(fmt.Stringer).String()) } func main() { print(&URL{}) // ok print(URL{}) // panic }
by tuesdaynight | 2025-07-30 19:04:19+00:00
I find truly baffling reading your comments everytime you show up. I know you are not dumb, but you have a belief so out of reality that it makes me aware how smart people can get disillusioned the same as dumb people. I agree with some of your points, then you go on about how you are afraid of being arrested for commenting on Hacker News and I start questioning myself if someday I will get in that place mentally if I don't take care of what I look through the internet.
by tuckerman | 2025-07-30 19:04:37+00:00
I think a fairly large number of people using IDEs use them for the writing code coding part almost exclusively, e.g. don't use many/any of the other "integrated" features like VCS integration, build integration, etc. As an example, I think most people I've seen use vscode still use git via the cli (less sure but I'd guess most of them use a separate terminal even).

I don't know for sure or have anything besides anecdotal evidence but I'd wager this is a majority of vscode users.
by Animats | 2025-07-30 19:04:42+00:00
I get the feeling this guy likes Lua. Lua combines arrays and dicts into "tables", which are usually indexed from 1 but can be indexed by any type as a dict. He never mentions Lua, though.

Multidimensional arrays are a blind spot for modern language designers. Not arrays of arrays, as this author points out. FORTRAN had multidimensional arrays, but C didn't. Go and Rust don't have them. Part of the trouble is slices. Once you have slices, people want slicing in multidimensional arrays along any axis, which complicates the basic array representation. Discussions in this area dissolved into bikeshedding and nothing got done for Go and Rust.
by m463 | 2025-07-30 19:04:43+00:00
> compared to the loudness wars

I would like to compare it to "cinema mode" on my television.

I sometimes turn on cinema mode, but although the colors have more subtlety, nuance and accuracy... dimness just doesn't compare as well as you think to a much brighter picture.

sigh.

That said, it's a little annoying that the apple camera app doesn't capture raw out-of-the-box.
by recipe19 | 2025-07-30 19:04:47+00:00
> an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.

And yet, farmers are a vocal and critical political bloc in every other EU country, too.

Farming is just important. Not as much because it employs a large portion of the population, but because it keeps a large portion of the population alive. It is the original industry that's "too big to fail" - if you let it, you get famine.
by HiPhish | 2025-07-30 19:04:52+00:00
Formerly fat person here. That article is just an overblown list of common sense advice to sell you some crap you don't need. Losing and maintaining your weight is actually really simple. Here is what worked for me (I am not a doctor):

- First of all, drop sugar. Right now. Even if you are not fat, you should not eat it. It's not just extra calories, it's poison. Don't be like "oh, I'll just finish this stuff I still have around", throw it out. If your are only going to follow one point from this list, then let it be this one.

- Forget about calories, a calorie is not a calorie. You cannot "work off" that cake your have eaten, your are not an oven. Calories are an upper limit (you cannot break thermodynamics), but the human metabolism is much more complicated than just balancing an equation.

- Exercise is necessary, but not sufficient. That means you should exercise to get your metabolism going, but exercising itself will not let your lose weight. And when I mean exercising I don't mean you need to get a gym membership. Just going for a walk for half an hour or an hour is good enough for starters.

- Fat won't make you fat. I grew up under low-fat propaganda, yet I kept getting fatter. Then when I increase my fat consumption I started losing weight. By fat I mean real animal fat from meat, not seed oils or other processed fats.

- Eat real food. If you cannot tell what it's made from by looking at it, then it's not real food.

- Processed fruits and vegetables are still processed food, and thus not real food. Don't be fooled by marketing, stuff like fruit juice is not healthy, no matter how many vitamin labels the manufacturer keeps putting on the packaging.

- Caloric restriction works in the short term, but will drive you crazy in the long term. This is why people lapse eventually and regain all their weight.

It is important to understand that obesity is not a "surplus of energy", it's a medical disorder brought about by disruption of your metabolism. I was able to keep eating and eating without ever feeling satiated. It is pure torture to be hungry with a full stomach. It was my body telling me "stop feeding me this garbage, give me real food". I have since been able to keep my weight and never feel hungry. It's only when I find myself unable to eat real food and lapse back into old habits that I start gaining weight again.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-30 19:05:00+00:00
There is absolutely nothing impressive about the car, except for the price at which Xiaomi is selling it.

If they actually are selling it at a sustainable margin, there is very deep trouble for the European and American car industry. If you are making something of the same quality and performance as your competition, but for double the price, you pretty much have no justification to exist.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-30 19:05:09+00:00
> Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.” We ask for features, we ask for volume discounts, we ask for the next data integration. We never think to ask for fast.

Almost everywhere I’ve worked, user-facing speed has been one of the highest priorities. From the smallest boring startup to the multi billion dollar company.

At companies that had us target metrics, speed and latency was always a metric.

I don’t think my experience has been all that unique. In fact, I’d be more surprised if I joined a company and they didn’t care about how responsive the product felt, how fast the pages loaded, and any weird lags that popped up.
by mattlutze | 2025-07-30 19:05:16+00:00
I'm currently on hiatus from work and took it on myself to build some passion projects. It's been really fun to strictly build with HTML5, hand-jammed CSS and I've been learning HTMX for some dynamic content.

They are soooo simple, but still feel like web applications I've seen significant businesses built around. I hope to drive more projects this direction when I'm at work again.
by twoWhlsGud | 2025-07-30 19:05:36+00:00
Which is one reason why I often still shoot with an actual camera and sometimes even with film. I have a lifetime of experience with common film emulsions and a couple of decades of shooting with digital sensors with limited post processing.

When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.

It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.

I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.
by andrewflnr | 2025-07-30 19:05:54+00:00
I mean, it still can be idiosyncratic if the local maximum is steep enough. Identifying and signalling subgroups of mitochondria in a cell to put on pause might be prohibitive, for instance, and would still reduce the power available to that cell.

Or maybe going all the way on and mostly-off with your mitochondria, even specifically with your brain mitochondria, really is that much more efficient than having half of them offline (but still consuming energy for upkeep) at any time. The brain is a big ol energy hog, after all.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-30 19:06:09+00:00
The Scottish have a nation called Scotland. It's not entirely sovereign - yet - but it's clearly heading in that direction, and it has already diverged significantly from England on many fundamental policies.

But even when it does become sovereign, I'm finding it hard to imagine that Scotland would annex Northumberland - which used to be Scotland in the distant past - and rape, murder, and starve the English people living there.

There is no excuse for the kind of barbarisms that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. Not ethnonationalism, not history, not the holocaust, not October 7.

And from an obvious common sense point of view, living in an embattled fortress territory is an eccentric definition of "safe."

It's an outbreak of collective psychopathy and deserves to be labelled as such. The people in charge are basically insane. Extremist ethnonationalism always is, whatever the nationality or background.
by isaacdl | 2025-07-30 19:06:11+00:00
It's a safety measure. When it comes to regulating aviation, in general, the FAA is concerned with protecting the public. The "public" doesn't generally have the knowledge to evaluate a pilot, aircraft, or the operation of an aviation venture. So, the FAA puts rules around these things. The private pilot is held to a much lower standard of skill than a commercial or airline pilot. But, that means that the FAA doesn't trust them to fly around the general public.

You can take your friend for a spin in your plane if you want, or go screw around and kill yourself, but you cannot "hold out" your operation as an air taxi or airline to the general public, and you can't make money off of it in any situation.

A commercial pilot has to undergo much more training in operating an aircraft safely. This means the FAA allows them to get paid to be a pilot - they could be hired to fly someone around in that person's plane. But the commercial license does not really train them in running a safe airline, so the FAA does not allow them to use their own plane to run an airline.

EDIT: To word it differently, the opportunity to get paid increases the likelihood that someone will push limits or take unsafe risks. If you aren't under pressure to make your paycheck, you're less likely to take your passengers into marginal weather. (One of the most dangerous occupations in aviation is medivac/aviation EMS. There, the pressure isn't generally monetary but moral: you want to help a sick patient, so you take more risks.)
by Aurornis | 2025-07-30 19:06:19+00:00
> I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable

Your experience is not normal.

If you’re seeing that much lag, the most likely explanation is your display. Many TVs have high latency for various processing steps that doesn’t matter when you’re watching a movie or TV, but becomes painful when you’re playing games.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-30 19:07:32+00:00
If the brain fundamentally needs sleep then we'd sleep regardless, just not aligned to the day-night cycle. There's quite a bit of variation in sleep patterns and amounts between different animals. Chinstrap Penguins only sleep a few seconds at a time, but still manage to rack up ~11hr sleep in a 24hr period! Elephants only sleep for ~2hr/day, horses for 3hr/day.
by __jonas | 2025-07-30 19:07:32+00:00
I just gave it a try again, unfortunately I couldn't really figure it out, my issues were these:

The Notion import didn't work correctly, I've got tons of links to 'missing pages' and messed up formatting – fine, this I can live with.

I want to see my hierarchy of pages and jump through them intuitively like I would in Notion, instead on the left sidebar there is something called 'widgets', one of them is called 'Pages'. This does not show all my top level pages, instead it seems to show all pages, regardless of how 'deep down' they are, and it also only shows a maximum of 14, so it's kind of useless for me.

Same with navigating through pages, I want to be able to click through to

/Projects/Some Project/foo/bar

And then quickly go back to 'Some Project' or 'Projects' again through a breadcrumbs style navigation at the top.

That's how the file system and Notion and most things on my computer work and I like that I don't have to think about it or learn some system to use it, it seems to me that Anytype just fundamentally doesn't work that way, it appears to treat pages (or objects) as nodes in a graph, with links and backlinks, which doesn't really fit with my way of thinking.

Not the software's fault, I'm sure some people like this style of knowledge organization but it's not for me I think.
by breuleux | 2025-07-30 19:07:34+00:00
What bothers me is that what I like about terminals is the scrolling workflow of writing commands and seeing my actions and outputs from various sources and programs sequentially in a log. So what I want is a rich full-HTML multi-program scrolling workflow. Instead, people are combining the worst of both worlds. What are they doing? Give me superior UI in a superior rendering system, not inferior UI in an inferior rendering system, god damn it.