MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajb | 2025-07-28 02:26:33+00:00
When a previous employer went bust, it was bought by the CEO after being listed by the administrator on an obscure website (ip-bid.com) which you have to make an account and log in to just to see the listings. There was only one bid. (I leave to the reader to speculate on the utility of a bid website without public listings, but such listings might represent good value compared to those advertised more widely). It may be worth checking company filings to see if there are equivalents used by insolvency administrators in Australia (I found out only by reading the administrator's "statement of proposals" on the fillings website after the fact -the sale wasn't advertised anywhere else as far as I can tell).
by topspin | 2025-07-28 02:27:42+00:00
Standard low rate production effects. Equipment like fire trucks are full of weird, low volume things made by a few, or only one shop somewhere, built exclusively to order, with long lead times. A fire truck is simultaneously a mobile power station, a mobile high pressure water pump, a mobile communications base station, and a high performance all-terrain, all-weather vehicle. It has to do all of that without killing any firemen, so there are very high liability costs factored in. Also, every major department has a collection of hang-ups about how a fire truck is supposed to function and what it's compatible with, so there is no way to scale production.

The consolidation of suppliers for all of this is also a contributor to cost and delivery time. That problem is endemic throughout Western economies.
by tomhow | 2025-07-28 02:29:55+00:00
I know, and it's an ongoing and developing issue for us to manage and find ways of addressing, knowing that it's only going to get harder.

Our position now (as always) is that the negative consequences of a false accusation outweigh the benefit of a valid accusation. We don't want to be a site that shames people or piles on. We can't really know what people are thinking when they post a comment, or why they might use a tool to generate or improve it. Downvoting and flagging are strong enough signals, and do enough to hide the comment if others agree that's what should happen, and that's what happened here. It's good to email us so we can see if there's a pattern of behaviour we need to know about so we can penalize or ban the account or take some other appropriate action once we can see the full picture.
by thephyber | 2025-07-28 02:32:36+00:00
> This is a very strange argument to make, the exact same applies to "native" apps.

Which is the point I was making. The parent and gp were making the argument that PWAs were positively better than native apps, which I was pushing back on.

None of your links disagree with my points, except the last one which suffers from survivor bias.
by caleblloyd | 2025-07-28 02:33:04+00:00
The reason we are not seeing this in mainstream software may also be due to cost. Paying for tokens on every interaction means paying to use the app. Upfront development may actually be cheaper, but the incremental cost per interaction could cost much more in the long term, especially if the software is used frequently and has a long lifetime.

As the cost of tokens goes down, or commodity hardware can handle running models capable of driving these interactions, we may start to see these UIs emerge.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-28 02:33:41+00:00
For years I saw saturation ads for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation on PBS, I found out years that this is the prime beneficiary of the ethanol program.

Farmers growing corn for ethanol are growing broke despite subsidies. The program is an environmental disaster because people in the Mississippi River basin should be growing anything except corn because corn is a crop that requires huge imports of nitrogen fertilizer which burns fuel and leaches into the environment and creates a huge dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico.

Farmers make much better money from agrivoltaics, if they can convert 10-20% of their land they can produce a huge amount of energy and spare the fertilizer, it is not a one-way trip, the solar cells can be removed in the future and in the meantime it supports a more diverse ecosystem. People have no idea what a win-win it is.
by KirinDave | 2025-07-28 02:33:49+00:00
In the interest of historical accuracy, Newton's work was directly and indirectly subsidized by his government as was the university he attended (that later gave him partial scholarship). He invented Calculus while isolated due to the plague, but had already graduated by then with those scholarship bucks from a university chartered by the British government.

A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call a tenured professor of mathematics, again at a universe with an impressive amount of money being donated directly by the British government.

In general, the history of higher learning is the history of governments (or the wealthy people who constitute them) funding research and facilities. You may not like it, but you shouldn't misrepresent history just to make your preferences sound more normal.
by arrosenberg | 2025-07-28 02:34:08+00:00
Monopoly is a misnomer, because it implies a single seller. In reality any market with a small number of incumbents will exhibit anti-competitive behavior, which is what people usually mean when they talk about monopolies and antitrust law. With a third of the market, a single company can effectively set prices based on desired margins, rather than having to compete on price.

Do you have evidence for your claim about well funded fire departments splurging on unneeded equipment? Police departments buy military surplus through federal programs that specifically encourage it [1]. It has nothing to do with how well funded they are, which is why you see that equipment show up even in smaller and poorer areas that don't have particularly well-funded police or the need for a Bradley fighting vehicle.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2020/06/12/police-departme...
by softgrow | 2025-07-28 02:34:55+00:00
Fire and rescue appliances are a bit of a problematic thing to buy as they never go very far and are retired with low mileages.

In my Australian State, South Australia, this a huge contrast with police who buy new from the manufacturer, get a three or maybe five year service contract from the manufacturer and then sell them when the warranty expires and they've done around 100,000 km (60,000 miles). So no servicing worries and they get some tax benefits so it works for them.

Ambulances have less mileage and my guess is retire after 10 years. Ambulances are very standardised so can swap metro and country vehicles to get value from the asset. There was a "twin life" ambulance (http://www.old-ambulance.com/Twin-Life.htm) that had a long life rear bit on a light truck chassis so swap out the motor bit two or three times every 200,000kms, but these days vans are used. There was much sadness in the ambulance fleet buying community when Ford discontinued the F150 type chassis in Australia.

But your average (fire/rescue) appliance in the city or country has low mileage. In the city plenty of use but never have to drive far. In the country not much use but do drive further but end up the same a very old vehicle without much mileage on the clock. Trailers can be even older 50 or 60 years before retirement. Another issue with a fire appliance is they carry water which is heavy, three tonnes is a pretty common load. And have other readers have mentioned a monopoly on manufacture wouldn't help.
by ehnto | 2025-07-28 02:35:17+00:00
You don't even need to consider politics to acknowledge this is dangerous, wildly irresponsible of a government to tie internet access to a foreign corporate entity's control. The privacy concerns of not being able to use a device free from Google services, may only be second to the sovereignty issues it introduces.

Whoops, Google have delisted your government app from the Play Store, how quickly can you de-couple your citizens internet access from the corptocracy?
by mondobe | 2025-07-28 02:35:19+00:00
I'm getting into frontend web development with Rust by making a tracker [1] (not the advertising kind, rather a type of music-making app that was popular with chiptune artists in the '90s).

This is my first time doing anything with frontend more complex than an image carousel, and I have occasionally felt that I'm in over my head with things like multithreading and audio playback, but it's immensely satisfying seeing the app come together.

I am extremely impressed by the Leptos framework [2], and I'm thrilled that I haven't had to write a single line of JS, even when doing DOM interactions or communicating with web workers.

Once I polish up the tracker frontend, I'd like to add a backend and potentially try to release it as a paid app.

[1] https://mondobe.com/tracker

[2] https://leptos.dev/
by Jensson | 2025-07-28 02:35:29+00:00
Where do you live? I live in Sweden and I have used a lot of not so bad software from Sweden. Maybe its just your country, but at least in Sweden the government can make software for its services that works well, better than what I've seen from the US government.

> and the one that was a bit better than terrible was bought by a US company

But here you say EU can make great software? Just that USA then buys it. So we should just ban USA from buying our great software companies, is that what you are saying?
by witnessme | 2025-07-28 02:36:32+00:00
My common problem with all these visual builders is that they get too complex to maintain, all my workflows built with them are sitting there for years, I fear to touch them again. On the contrary the benefit these visual builders offer is the speed to get started, but with Cursor and Code Claude, it has become way easier to write a new workflow, comparable to visual builders for easy use cases, and even faster for complex use cases.
by ayhanfuat | 2025-07-28 02:37:02+00:00
It is actually worse than that. The product manager of this feature claimed that the system worked on both earthquakes and when he was asked why people say they didn’t get this alert he basically said “people probably didn’t notice the alerts due to the severity of the event” (https://youtu.be/z-KjVQJ7XKE?si=xwHuholLJV9xjBov). I know Google would be pretty down the list of those responsible for the effects of these earthquakes but they did misinform the public.
by famahar | 2025-07-28 02:37:13+00:00
Been working on a games curation site that is focused on hyper specific themes (https://exhibitplay.com/). I find game genres to be so broad, which makes discovery a boring process. My idea is to take a curatorial approach and make collections that highlight the themes that exist within genres.

It's pretty simple, JSON data that I manually fill out and display in a grid. Takes some inspiration from Letterboxd lists. Future plan is to run online and in-person exhibitions for smaller curation and to commission writers and other curators to provide further depth and insight into a list.

I have no plans to turn this into a profitable thing. It's a pure passion project which I hope will benefit researchers, academics, other curators, and the whole game community. It's a resource as much as it is a celebration.
by btbuildem | 2025-07-28 02:37:21+00:00
Authors of both articles (OP's and the one it's responding to) seem to have the answer, put it in their mouths, turn it around with their tongues, and spit it back out, not recognizing it as the obvious way forward: self-hosting was how the internet started. It was the good old days. Now that we are all dancing puppets in the attention attrition economy, the answer is still the same: independence through concrete means. This means being able to tell some service provider to fuck off all the way to the top of Fuck Off Mountain, to swap out A for B, to connect to X, Y and Z, etc. On my own website, I can say whatever I want, and there's absolutely fuck-all you can do about it. You don't like it? You can leave.

Sure, the walled gardens of social media have conditioned new generations to twitch in unison, crave likes and spill rage via comments -- but is that something we want to sustain? I'd deprive that of oxygen and watch it wither. Give me ACTUAL connections, with the people I care about. The shimmering flickering scrolling dopamine drip gets in the way of real connection.

I think the idea of some kind of a distributed, persistent identity is a terrible spectre. Given how much power the incumbents have, if any kind of distributed identity authority actually took root, they would either clone their own and smother the original, or adopt it outright -- with the terrifying consequences of now being able to control your online presence everywhere, and tied to your actual offline identity. This would mean they could exact suffering on you everywhere (not just online) for whatever actions of yours they deem to be transgressions in their own little worlds.

No, the future IS self-hosted. Whether the "self" is an individual, a group, a community -- the answer is in a robust network of independent nodes, that actively choose how and whom they cooperate / interoperate with.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-07-28 02:37:31+00:00
When it's companies preying on impulse buying, brands, trends, temporary demand spikes like a popular water park on a popular weekend then it's understandable to see people paying more than they "should" have (according to one's own high and mighty objective standards), and perhaps blame "capitalism" or believe there should be some regulation to protect consumers. Sure.

But when it is government bureaucrats spending public money procuring multi million dollar equipment, the problem is more likely to be government corruption or at best incompetence.
by agulli71 | 2025-07-28 02:37:36+00:00
A great question I hear is, 'With AI changing so fast, why write a book that could be quickly outdated?' My motivation was actually the opposite. It's precisely because things are moving so quickly that we need to step back and identify the underlying principles that are solidifying. Patterns like RAG, Reflection, Routing, Memory and the others I discuss, are becoming fundamental building blocks. This book is an invitation to reflect on these core ideas, which provide the foundation we need to build upon. Humans need these reflection moments on foundation patterns
by IlikeKitties | 2025-07-28 02:39:04+00:00
> What if I refuse to buy a device with a secure enclave that I don't have access to? Am I now censored from a chunk of the internet?

The idea is that once you get used to that, you will get censored from all the internet.

> Is the EU essentially foisting a someone-else-owns-your-keys regime onto their citizens?

Not quite, it's the EU essentially foisting a don't-use-free-software regime onto their citizens
by ElevenLathe | 2025-07-28 02:39:23+00:00
jacobolus wrote:

> The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value

You, in reply, wrote:

> The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1]

I'm saying you're wrong. There is not a choice to be made. We want the $10 tomorrow. No rational person can disagree with this if the person making the choice is the US federal government, who can spend money into existence. If we have some use for $1 now, just spend that $1 into existence too! Then, tomorrow, we'll have the $10 too!

If you agree with the cuts, you must logically agree that they are a bad investment: that $1 today will net us 75 cents tomorrow.
by ihiep | 2025-07-28 02:39:31+00:00
I'm building Zenta, a small set of offline tools to help you focus and stay present.

And Flow – a terminal app that helps you track deep work without distractions. It runs locally, keeps things simple, and protects your attention instead of just counting time.

Made for developers who want calm, not noise.

GitHub:

- https://github.com/e6a5/zenta

- https://github.com/e6a5/flow
by godelski | 2025-07-28 02:39:57+00:00
3MB? Good god, that'd be ridiculous!

You misread. I'm using 74K for *vim* configs. (Mostly because I have a few files for organization's sake)

I rounded up to 3M from 2.3M and 1.4M of that is .git lol. 156K is all my rc files, another 124K for anything that goes into ~/.confg, 212K for my notes, 128K for install scripts, 108K for templates, and 108K for scripts

I'll repeat myself, with the *same emphasis* as above. Hopefully it's clearer this time.

>> The git folder with **all** my dotfiles (which includes all my notes) is just 3M

I was just saying it's pretty simple to carry *everything* around, implying that this is nothing in comparison to something like a plugin or even VScode itself. I mean I went to the VScode plugin page and a lot of these plugins are huge. *All* of the plugins I have *combined* (including unused) are 78M. The top two most installed VSC plugins are over 50M. Hell, the ssh plugin is 28M! I don't have a single plugin that big!
by password4321 | 2025-07-28 02:40:03+00:00
Show HN: MCP server for Blender that builds 3D scenes via natural language

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622374 (2025-07-20; 62 comments)

Probably a useless submission but the discussion linked to the real thing at https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp
by autodba-ish | 2025-07-28 02:41:34+00:00
Working on AutoDBA [1]. The goal is to help developers and DBAs find and fix common performance issues, misconfigurations, unused indices, and silent slowdowns directly in your IDE.

We're trying to figure out how to narrow down our target audience and get to early revenue. Also, how we can grow the extension adoption.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=autodba-...
by stinkbeetle | 2025-07-28 02:41:41+00:00
> I've found it somewhat interesting that we'll be shocked at a fire truck, which gets a life time of 15-25 years and works in the service exclusively of saving lives, costs around $2 million, but not be shocked that we effectively use something as expensive as a fire truck as a single round in a gigantic gun.

Isn't military spending and the corruption of the government military industrial complex one of the oldest gripes in the American public forum? People sure are outraged about it, or were[1] -- has that become passe now?

[1] "The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement." -- Eisenhower 1953
by perching_aix | 2025-07-28 02:41:42+00:00
This collision course has been a long time brewing, though I'm not even sure why integrity checking is included in this. The data source for the age information is the governments, there's no need to trust the clientside per se, it's just a middleman.

One thing I find reassuring is the nature of pushback on display on the repo (only read the first few comments there, mind you). Really not what I expected phrasing and rhetoric wise (unlike here), honestly kind of restored a very very tiny and fragile bit of faith in humanity in me, it's very reserved and reasonable stuff.
by Daub | 2025-07-28 02:42:14+00:00
I teach digital painting, and Procreate is slowly becoming my enemy. I fully appreciate its ease of use, its fantastic union with Apple Pen and certainly my students love it. But doing design/creative work on a small screen is not healthy, especially for complex images. neither is it easy to maintain a complex workflow, such as that required by matt painting and multi-layer compositing. Also, any presence of tablets in a design teaching lab is never pretty... I can't easily review their files or integrate their output into a pro desktop app.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-07-28 02:43:08+00:00
What a dumb opinion. The Nanjing Massacre is on par with what Israel is doing to Gaza.

> The parallels are too stark to ignore: entire communities annihilated, women’s bodies weaponized to humiliate nations, and atrocities proudly recorded.

LITERALLY WHAT IS HAPPENING IN GAZA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violen...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinia...
by benreesman | 2025-07-28 02:43:16+00:00
It's nice when a technical solution exists for a people problem, but as much respect as I have for both Sir Berners-Lee and Schneier, I don't think this is one of those instances.

The rights of individuals come into conflict with the interests powerful organizations precisely at the points in which the great documents deem it necessary to enumerate them as rights: this is by construction.

Whether you are reading the Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or in a sense, the Magna Carts) the themes are around personal sovereignty, presumption of innocence, ownership and disposal of property, freedom from surveillance and coercion and other abuses of power. This is because absent such norms and their enforcement by principled leaders, the powerful in general find it in their interests to infringe the rights of the less powerful.

We are at such a moment today: the consolidation of power in the hands of unaccountable organizations and the capture of institutions by the unprincipled has met an explosion of activity and possibility in the digital realm, but it is not unique to it.

This is usually solved by violence, sometimes blessedly by negotiation, but it is always solved: once the wishes of ever smaller in number choke out the hope and dignity of the ever larger in number to sufficient degree: change happens as surely as winter turns to spring.
by lastcoyotes | 2025-07-28 02:45:24+00:00
I got laid off so I'm dusting off an old python project that takes OTF/TFF files and applies algorithmic effects to them. Then you can export the font as a new OTF/TFF file to unleash on your own design work, websites, etc.

I wanted interesting looking typefaces for my printmaking assignments when I was taking studio art classes on the side in university. Now that I've been laid off, I wanna polish it and see what other people create with it.

Lots of room to rewrite and improve it, but I have job applications and interviews to get through.

I was working on a routing application for San Francisco (+Daly City) where it includes being able to put how willing you are to walk to certain bus routes instead of how most apps try to put the least amount of walking and don't consider that if the wait for a bus or train is long, then I don't mind walking to connect to another route that takes me to my destination faster. It takes tree shade, elevation, and marked off location to avoid into account.

It evolved into more of tool for planning leisure walks and runs that could hit places I'd want to visit with a loose timeline--for days where I would want to wander and then end up at a particular stop/station to get back home.

Talking about them here has more ideas churning in my head and reminds me to step outside of my little bubble to remember why I truly love coding. To make fun and convenient experiences.
by recipe19 | 2025-07-28 02:45:50+00:00
I hate to say this, but it seems like a pretty clear case of using the wrong tool for the job.

There's no conceivable reason to cut something this simple on a large-format CNC mill. It's literally just a couple of straight cuts. It's not going to be faster (not with standard endmills), not going to be easier, and it's not going to be cheaper unless you're making them by the thousands.

You can likely buy S4S lumber for less than an oversized sheet of furniture-grade 1" plywood.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-07-28 02:46:37+00:00
Lawyers and the legal system are the least capable of dealing with this. There's a reason why every in-house council needs outside representation. Because they don't know what they're doing.

They know what papers to file, but the actual arguments come from experts.

> AI can be very persuasive

Closing remarks are meant to be very persuasive. Let's not pretend like facts and evidence matters to the courts.