MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qingcharles | 2025-07-31 02:11:57+00:00
What changes have been made to the HN design since it was launched?

I know there are changes to the moderation that have taken place many times, but not to the UI. It's one of the most stable sites in terms of design that I can think of.

What other sites have lasted this long without giving in to their users' whims?

Over the last 4 years my whole design ethos has transformed to "WWHND" (What Would Hacker News Do?) every time I need to make any UI changes to a project.
by tomhow | 2025-07-31 02:13:15+00:00
Please don't reply to a bad comment with an even worse comment. That's the epitome of inflammatory behavior. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by xwolfi | 2025-07-31 02:13:16+00:00
Yeah, we all own all code, if we can't understand the code we own, we study it. If we need to change it, we change it.

"Legacy" for me is a bad word. I refuse to use it, and I scold my colleagues when they do: it's our code, we modernize it if we don't like it, and if we stop using it, then it's finished code. What is this false dichotomy between legacy code and "not in prod yet code" ?

In companies we call our regulatory prosecutions for fraudulent behavior that are so complex that they last for 10 years "legacy matters". Do you think that points at a statement of factual representation, or at a ridiculous attempt at distancing ourselves from our actual responsibilities ?
by thorum | 2025-07-31 02:13:41+00:00
If you’re a power user of these LLMs and have coding experience, I actually recommend just whipping together your own bespoke chat UI that you can customize however you like. Grab any OpenAI compatible endpoint for inference and a frontend component framework (many of which have added standard Chat components) - the rest is almost trivial. I threw one together in a week with Gemini’s assistance and now I use it every day. Is it production ready? Hell no but it works exactly how I want it to and whenever I find myself saying “I wish it could do XYZ…” I just add it.
by sudomateo | 2025-07-31 02:14:24+00:00
We're working on publishing an updating pricing page to better communicate this to the public. Stay tuned!

Here's what I can knowingly share. We sell full-rack and half-rack SKUs today coming in at 1024/16TiB and 2048/32TiB of CPU cores and RAM respectively. Disk varies depending on the drive size. On top of the cost of the rack you'll pay an annual percentage for support and that's it. No software licensing or other weird fees.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-07-31 02:15:58+00:00
Agree, also llms change the balance of plan vs do for me, sometimes it cheaper to do & review than up-front plan.

When you can see what goes wrong with the naive plan you then have all the specific context in front of you for making a better plan.

If something is wrong with the implementation then I can ask the agent to then make a plan which avoids the issues / smells I call out. This itself could probably be automated.

The main thing I feel I'm "missing" is, I think it would be helpful if there were easier ways to back up in the conversation such that the state of the working copy was restored also. Basically I want the agent's work to be directly integrated with git such that "turns" are commits and you can branch at any point.
by zahlman | 2025-07-31 02:16:25+00:00
> The compromise was first identified through several concerning indicators:

> Missing Repository Tag: Unlike previous releases, version 0.5.15 was published to PyPI without a corresponding tag in the official GitHub repository at https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/num2words/tags

> Timing Discrepancy: The package appeared on PyPI without any associated commits or release activities in the source repository

> Community Alert: Security researcher @johnk3r quickly raised the alarm on social media, warning the community about potential compromise

This is one of the AI "tells" that I find especially strange. It doesn't just overuse these bullet-point lists; it puts things in the list that clearly don't belong.

The "community alert", of course, is not a "concerning indicator" that was used to identify the compromise.

But if you take that out, "several" is a strange way to describe "two", and the whole thing would clearly be better written as free-form prose.
by cycomanic | 2025-07-31 02:17:14+00:00
> Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all.

This is such a great observation. I'm not quite sure why this is. I'm not a programmer, but a signal-processing/system engineer/researcher. The weird thing seems that it's the process of programming that causes the "not-thinking" behaviour, e.g. when I program a simulation and I find that I must have a sign error somewhere in my implementation (sometimes you can see this from the results), I end up switching every possible sign around instead of taking a pen and pencil and comparing theory and implementation, if I do other work, e.g. theory, that's not the case. I suspect we try to avoid the cost of the context switch and try to stay in the "programming-flow".
by exasperaited | 2025-07-31 02:18:32+00:00
As I commented elsewhere, I have, and I have very nearly called the RSPCA on their owners.

I think these people should not have pets (not least because dogs fully can be trained to be happier alone).

If you work away from your home for long days, you should consider not having a social animal as a pet. Get a cat; they don’t give a shit.
by tomhow | 2025-07-31 02:18:46+00:00
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44738071 and marked it off-topic. It's not OK to follow users around HN and attack them for things they've posted in other threads, no matter who they are, what the topic is or whatever was in the original comment that you found objectionable. That's not what we do here.
by FridgeSeal | 2025-07-31 02:18:52+00:00
In addition to all this, I’m also of the opinion that most users just have software “lumped on them” and have little to no recourse for complaint, so they’re just forced/trained to put-up-and-shut-up about it.

As a result, performance (and a few other things) functionally never gets “requested”. Throw in the fact that for many mid-to-large orgs, software is not bought by the people who are forced to use it and you have the perfect storm for never hearing about performance complaints.

This in turn, justifies never prioritising performance.
by danielcorin | 2025-07-31 02:19:47+00:00
I’ve been building a Swift app [1], compatible with OpenAI APIs, easy model switching across providers, and with hotkeys for OS integration to capture text and images. It’s far more minimal than most other LLM frontends I’ve tried, but it’s been sticky for me.

[1]: https://www.wvlen.llc/apps/tomo
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-31 02:20:47+00:00
Competition leads to great outcomes - in society, in business, in sports.

In sports the rules are the same for all, and opportunities are made reasonably equal because that tends to lead to the best entertainment.

The same is not true in business where unfair advantages are celebrated. Unfortunately this doesn't always lead to rivalry and often leads to monopolies which impede progress.

If business was treated more like sport, we might have a very different society!
by adabyron | 2025-07-31 02:20:47+00:00
Anders Hejlsberg, a main architect on C# & TS, stated somewhere that they re-wrote the TS Compiler in Go because the syntax was the closest to how it was originally written and allowed re-writing to be easiest. He has a great write up of it somewhere on GitHub.

Microsoft is an insanely huge company. There teams seem to be able to use whatever works best for the project/team.

The old XKCD comic of org charts in big tech shows Microsoft as a bunch of people aiming guns at each other for a reason. They'll have 5 teams making 5 competing products sometimes. That's the culture I'm aware of. I'm not aware of the dogfooding culture you are suggesting.
by jaydcarlson | 2025-07-31 02:20:55+00:00
You're clobbering together a bunch of different stuff and not making a ton of sense. C and C++ are very different languages, and that's especially true when doing interop with them from other languages.

For C-based libraries, P/invoking is trivial in C# and has been around forever. And it's cross-platform, working identically on Linux and macOS. I have no idea how you can say ".Net hasn’t ever really had that kind of focus" when it's been a core part of .NET from the start, and .NET relies on P/Invoke to do everything. Go look at all the DllImport() statements in the .NET reference source. Rust FFI is nearly identical in implementation to C#. Go has a slightly different implementation with the CGO module, but whatever, it's close enough. Just step back and remember that, in general, calling into C code is trivial in every language, since it has to be: all these languages will eventually have to hit libc / user32.dll / whatever.

C++ is a totally different story. You can't work with C++ libraries with P/Invoke, that's true... But you also can't work with C++ libraries using Rust or Go, either. Nor Python, Java, Javascript, or really any other popular cross-platform language.

C++ dynamic libraries are really challenging to call into for a variety of reasons. Virtual functions, multiple inheritance, RTTI, name-mangling, struct/class layout, vtable placement, ABI differences, runtimes, etc all make calling into precompiled C++ libraries a nightmare.

In fact, the only way I know of working with pre-compiled C++ libraries is with languages that target specific operating system / compiler collections. E.g., Objective-C++/Swift from Apple, and C++/CLI from Microsoft. These are obviously not cross-platform solutions, since they depend on knowing the exact compiler configuration used to build those libraries in the first place.

For every other language, you either need to manually build C shim libs that you can call into using the C-based approach above, or if you have access to the C++ source code, creating wrappers around it and building it into a module (for example, using pybind11 in Python).
by maxbond | 2025-07-31 02:21:31+00:00
> HZO is a ferroelectric. That is, it has a crystal structure that allows it to maintain an internal electrical field even when no external voltage is applied. (Conventional dielectrics don’t have this inherent electrical field.) When a voltage is applied to the transistor, HZO’s inherent electric field opposes it. In a transistor, this leads to a counterintuitive effect: A decrease in voltage causes an increase in the charge stored in HZO. This negative capacitance response effectively amplifies the gate control, helping the transistor’s 2D electron cloud accumulate charge and boosting the on-state current.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-31 02:22:59+00:00
> Striving for good faith argument is only effective when both sides agree that they gain mutual benefits through agreement, otherwise your good faith is used as a tool to stall, disrupt, and do harm.

I may agree that this is an unequal yoke slung across both a good faith commenter and a rules-lawyered troll, assuming that your interpretation is accurate. However, it is not for us to say that bad faith must be answered with bad, and in fact the guidelines say that we must keep the good faith even in the face of bad. Otherwise we become the very thing we wrestle against.

You’re arguing for a kind of strained logic that suggests that two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do, as if that could justify driving the wrong way down a one-way street. All roads might lead to Rome, but you can’t get there from here.

For what it’s worth, the comment I’m referring to in which shaming by me was perhaps not consistent with the guidelines was this one, in which I say that the commenter was wrong, their comment was bad, and they should feel bad. Dang said that this wasn’t okay, and I tend to agree to a point. We aren’t solely preaching to the choir here, so it’s not for me to say that they should feel bad per se, because that would be to stand in judgment of them as a person, and not merely to find their views contemptible. I don’t know if I find dang’s reasoning entirely convincing on the points, but I know his heart is in the right place by calling me out when I emailed him about being rate limited. You may also feel free to judge me, as I have also found myself feeling as you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568173
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-31 02:23:02+00:00
The amount of bathwater is increasing rapidly, whilst the baby is about the same size.

And it's almost purely bathwater that gets put in my face on the YT front page. The occasional baby pops up.

(as someone who rarely logs in, and only with a couple of throw away-ish accounts because I don't like being tracked and don't like YT/Google - so this will affect my perception of the baby:bathwater ratio)
by opan | 2025-07-31 02:23:23+00:00
The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement.

To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother posting about how they're glad minors can use social media freely, but once restrictions are in place they will quickly complain (because they prefer the old way).
Show HN: Anti-short-form platform for meaningful content
by rohannihalani | 2025-07-31 02:23:34+00:00
I built Rhome to combat the endless flood of short-form, low-effort content that dominates most platforms today.

On Rhome, you explore trusted recommendations from friends and thoughtful individuals — books, articles, podcasts, movies, and more. No infinite feeds, no meaningless likes, no 15-second dopamine loops. Just meaningful content shared by people you actually care about.

Would love to hear thoughts and feedback!
by JackFr | 2025-07-31 02:25:03+00:00
I have a strictly hobby web app that I work on. 6-7 years ago I inadvertently pushed AWS email service credentials to GitHub.

Half an hour after the push I got an email and text from GitHub that I had exposed credentials. I quickly logged in to my AWS to turn off the service, to see that AWS had suspended that service because the bounce rate on the 80000 emails sent in that 15 minute period was too high. It was crazy just how fast it was exploited.
by adabyron | 2025-07-31 02:25:51+00:00
C# has been around a long enough time and Microsoft's teams over that time have done a pretty good job making upgrading each version easy.

As long as the current leadership in the C# & .NET teams remain, it's a very safe language and framework to use. They also deserve huge kudos to API & performance improvements the past decade since moving on from .NET Framework 4.x, which still runs fine.

They also have a lot of internal & external users using it.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-31 02:27:01+00:00
The issue I have is this is all for naught. All it does is make things more complicated.

Some with kids will praise and use it as intended. Many with kids won't. Those without kids won't. All in return for the ultimate in monitoring.

And then people will work around it in various ways. Use forums or chat-group apps that don't comply with the law as intended. Share videos in other ways.

This whole shebang is pointless for enforcement and scary for authoritarianism - worst of both worlds.
by hinkley | 2025-07-31 02:27:11+00:00
> Leakage current is a well-known problem in these kinds of transistors, “so integrating an innovative ferroelectric layer into the gate stack to address this has clear promise,” says Aaron Franklin, an electrical engineer at Duke University, in Durham, N.C. “It certainly is an exciting and creative advancement.”

I'm wondering if this will eventually transition out of power electronics into other sorts of electronics. Sounds like they've got their next five years planned just looking at power electronics though.
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-31 02:27:28+00:00
That's missing the point altogether. A basic investigation will yield:

* Memantine has NMDAr antagonism effects which will weaken depressive thoughts.

* Memantine has dopaminergic agonist activity (which builds very slowly), eventually improving mood.

* Telmisartan has PPAR gamma activation effects which synergizes with its ARB effect for potent neurological benefits.

* Intense exercise synergizes with all of the above, although it's less critical if the environmental trigger of depression is eliminated.

A reductive investigation will find that the individual components don't cure depression, and that's beside the point. It is only their combination that fully normalizes things.
by kazinator | 2025-07-31 02:27:38+00:00
If the training set contained BitTorrent magnet links to the desired information (e.g. images whose pixels are to be trained on, then, yes, it would have to.

Upthread it was mentioned that the training data representation contained links to material; magnet links were mentioned in passing as an example of something supposedly not violating copyright. It wasn't stated that training data contained magnet links. (Did it?)
by malux85 | 2025-07-31 02:27:52+00:00
I have a vm with NsCDE installed for when I what that childhood nostalgia hit

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

One of my mentors when I was very young gave me an Alphaserver 2100A running OpenVMS with CDE on it, and I remember using the installed scientific software (cant remember the name) to do 3D graphs, and so began a lifelong love of scientific computing!
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-31 02:27:59+00:00
> Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.

I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.

I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-31 02:28:54+00:00
So it will feel like Real® UNIX® again.

Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched to GNOME.

Now you just need that utility that replicates HDD clicking noise through the speaker when your SSD is accessed.

Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? For extra realism have a script that randomly kills the process every 15 minutes to simulate Netscape crashing.
by silentpuck | 2025-07-31 02:31:26+00:00
I use LLMs mostly for learning and understanding.

When a book doesn’t explain something clearly, I ask for a deeper explanation — with examples, and sometimes exercises.

It’s like having a quiet teacher nearby who never gets frustrated if I don’t get it right away. No magic. Just thinking.

I also started building my own terminal-based GPT client (in C, of course). That’s a whole journey in itself — and it’s only just begun.
by tim-- | 2025-07-31 02:32:38+00:00
From the designer's website (https://anti.as/optiker-k) it seems that this was commissioned by ANTI Hamar for the rebranding project for Optiker-K, a Norwegian optician and optometrists store.

This is fantastic! More custom fonts like this should be open sourced.

To me the font looks pretty legible. Worth noting that the font is from 2018, so it's not really a new font, but it is still one of my favorites.
by dxdm | 2025-07-31 02:34:12+00:00
I don't think that public transportation should strive to price out people of lesser means to fix demand vs supply problems. That's what Uber is for.

Of course it's fine to give people an incentive to ride outside of peak hours if they can, but demand is not that elastic, because of daily rhythms and how interconnected they are. Raising prices until you have removed the last option a lot of people have to get around, just so that others can enjoy their ride more, will remove a lot of opportunities from the economy.

I'd also be interested to know if the slack introduced by people moving their travel to off-peak times is not immediately taken up by others again, in the way that widening a congested road often just allows more cars to be congested at the same time. (Edit: Which can still be a good thing, especially for public transportation, because I'd argue that giving more utility to more people is its mission.)
by benrbray | 2025-07-31 02:34:52+00:00
> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life

It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.

A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-07-31 02:35:10+00:00
there's seriously nothing complicated about this. Define ownership. Who cares about owning a bunch of computers? If you can get the compute, and you pay up front for it once, and then you can sell "it" later, and it's cheaper than renting, what does it matter if the compute comes in the form of a physical box or if it is in the cloud? So these are all things that matter about ownership! To me, occupying a physical space is not important for ownership, wrt servers.

Nobody is saying anything about anything unethical... I am mocking the idea of needing the steel box, forget about the steel box.

It's just Amazon Reserved Instances, but with an indefinite period. Okay? Isn't that an attractive product?

Why am I talking about banks? Because maybe in Oxide's deck it says, "Amazon will NEVER do this. Amazon will NEVER sell indefinite reserved instances." Fine. Well a bank can simply pay spot prices and sell you an up front price, if you want. Okay? It's the same thing. It only matters what Amazon does when we're talking about $100m Series B, which is what this article is about! It's not about the technology.

> On-premises computing was so good that the cloud providers packaged it up and sold it back to people at a premium that could only ever be rented.

No... guys... AWS makes sense. It's not a premium "that could only ever be rented." There are a ton of much cheaper cloud providers. Amazon just happens to be selling the Rolls Royce of clouds. They have a ridiculous margin. Figma makes more profit for AWS each year than it will ever make for itself in its entire lifetime. "that could only ever be rented" is simply not true, they can afford to make all sorts of innovative pricing models, reserved instances being one of them.

Oxide just hasn't had to compete with "99 Year AWS Reserved Instances." But absolutely, positively, utterly nothing stops them from offering that. They already give you a massive, MASSIVE discount for 3 year reservations.

That said, obviously not having to deal with human beings managing hardware is valuable. It's the same shit as the difference between "AI" meaning a computer and overseas workforces. They might produce the same outputs for the same cost, but think deeply about yourself: how much are you willing to pay to deal with a computer instead of an IT tech? To avoid phone calls? To avoid doing things that might be faster, but are in person?