MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phkahler | 2025-07-15 10:44:32+00:00
I watched the Grok 4 video with Elon and crew last night. Elon kept making statements about what Grok would do in the next year. It hasn't invented anything yet, but it will advance technology in a year. There was some other prediction too.

These things are impressive and contain a ton of information, but innovating is a very different thing. It might come to be, but it's not inevitable.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-15 10:45:03+00:00
>So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?

Yes, but only in the most ignorant "this quarter the state dug through the DB fined the shit out a bunch of people for papers violations and therefor I am safer" line of reasoning.

In all the cases where there's a "real criminal" they're after the database provides very little information that isn't redundant to the old fashioned police work they'd do to begin with (like getting a warrant and looking up the person's phone and transaction records)

>Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.

There's a special kind of irony in picking examples that all have large swaths of the populations that think we could wholly do without that category of laws.
by a_wild_dandan | 2025-07-15 10:46:08+00:00
> The other inventions would have quite the adoption rate if they were similarly subsidized as current AI offerings.

No, they wouldn't. The '80s saw obscene investment in AI (then "expert systems") and yet nobody's mom was using it.

> It's hard to compare a business attempting to be financially stable and a business attempting hyper-growth through freebies.

It's especially hard to compare since it's often those financially stable businesses doing said investments (Microsoft, Google, etc).

---

Aside: you know "the customer is always right [in matters of taste]"? It's been weirdly difficult getting bosses to understand the brackets part, and HN folks the first part.
by throw0101b | 2025-07-15 10:46:42+00:00
> […] or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure

Manufacturers should print on the sleeve "fibre optic only. no copper". :)

> [Buried pros:] Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.

Except for that one old lady who took the country of Armenia off the air:

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman...
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-15 10:47:44+00:00
You know so little about how the world actually works that it's funny you even try to speak about it.

Society would literally cease to function if the government stopped providing the services that your "friction" funds. Roads, the court system, police, waste and water, defense - these barely scratch the surface of what the US government provides, and yet remove any one of them and it would be enough to bring down the entire economy.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 10:49:52+00:00
That's actually a quite good high-level measure. However, I'd question your measurement: I doubt that Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel would actually be able to destroy their creations. SpaceX, Tesla, X, Meta, Palantir - they're all large organizations with many stakeholders, and their founders/chairman do not have absolute control over them. The result of any of those individuals attempting to destroy their creations is not guaranteed - on the contrary, I'd expect other stakeholders to quickly intervene to block or pivot any such moves; the organization would survive, and such move would only make the market lose confidence in the one making it.

There's no total ownership in structures as large as this - neither in companies nor in countries. There are other stakeholders, and then the organization has a mind of its own, and they all react to actions of whoever is nominally "running it".
by easwee | 2025-07-15 10:51:31+00:00
We built this to help devs compare real-time speech systems side by side.

You can speak into the mic or upload audio. The tool sends the same input to each provider and shows live outputs next to each other.

It’s fully open and reproducible. You can fork it on Github if you want to run your own local tests or plug in your own provider.

https://github.com/soniox/soniox-compare

Would love feedback or suggestions, especially from folks who have tested providers in production.
by alamb | 2025-07-15 10:52:27+00:00
We are actively working on supporting extension types. The mechanism is likely to be using the Arrow extension type mechanism (a logical annotation on top of existing Arrow types https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#format-me...)

I expect this to be used to support Variant https://github.com/apache/datafusion/issues/16116 and geometry types

(note I am an author)
by beAbU | 2025-07-15 10:53:54+00:00
Like others have said, go and watch it. It holds up exceptionally well. It's just a plain good movie. The tension, acting, the special effects, quotable moments, the dinosaurs, everything.

Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.

I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
by mort96 | 2025-07-15 10:54:02+00:00
A #00ff00 green is gonna be much, much brighter and more intense than a #0000ff blue. If we call #0000ff "blue", it makes sense that the color called "green" should be of similar brightness/intensity to the color we call "blue".

Not that it's very consistent. The color called "red" is #ff0000, which looks brighter than both #008800 and #0000ff IMO. And arguably, "blue" shouldn't be #0000ff, since that's just not a very pleasent color. I think I might've been tempted to go with something like, red = #cc0000, green = #008800, blue = #0055ff. Or maybe go all the way and specify the colors in some perceptual color space rather than using RGB. But oh well.

(The color #0000ff for "blue" is super over used IMO. Most terminal emulators default to it as well and it just makes blue text hard to read in most out-of-the-box configurations. To get a nice blue color, you need some green in there.)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-15 10:54:41+00:00
What's going on here?

What part of your comment says something about gravity that is different from what I've already said about it?

How do you look at a quote stating explicitly that action at a distance is, by definition, instantaneous, and say "I'm not seeing where any of this requires faster than light travel"?

> So the gravitational attraction of my hand has, right now, already reached the end of universe, out to infinity.

And how has the gravitational attraction of your hand gone more than 200 light years from Earth?
by pjmlp | 2025-07-15 10:54:42+00:00
Initially when Satya took over many were oblieged to use Macs and Linux, exactly because they had to ensure their services also worked great on them, and that there as a culture shift beyond Windows one and only.

The problem is that this kind of backfired, and nowadays they also seem unable to hire new devs, outside game developers, that actually know what developing native Windows applications, and OS services actually means in practice.

Even though Microsoft nowadays is more open, I miss the "Developers, Developers, Developers" mindset on the Windows development team.
by account42 | 2025-07-15 10:56:34+00:00
> They really are. For example, there's expensive crimes relating to "encouraging/inducing" illegal immigration that could put a lot of people in prison if they were aggressively enforced: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Encouraging/Inducing -- Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) makes it an offense for any person who -- encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.")

> Similarly, criminal penalties for knowingly continuing to employ an alien one knows is unauthorized: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Subsection 1324a(2) makes it unlawful for any person or entity, after hiring an alien for employment, to continue to employ the alien in the United States knowing the alien is or has become an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.").

These are absolutely reasonable and should be expected.
by alamb | 2025-07-15 10:57:29+00:00
> That is, start with Wild West and define specs as needed

Yes this is my personal hope as well -- if there are new index types that are widespread, they can be incorporated formally into the spec

However, changing the spec is a non trivial process and requires significant consensus and engineering

Thus the methods used in the blog can be used to use indexes prior to any spec change and potentially as a way to prototype / prove out new potential indexes

(note I am an author)
by vladms | 2025-07-15 10:59:13+00:00
Have you ever read the contraindication list of a medicine? It is the same kind of trade-off. Someone can choose to use something in a "mission critical system" (whatever that is) because the alternatives are worse, not because the chosen solution is perfect (that does not mean I would advise using PostgreSQL - just accepting that it can happen).

On the other hand "quirks like these" are the reason you should not update too often mission critical systems.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-15 10:59:30+00:00
Oh, it gets worse. The next stage is sort of a dual mode of personhood: AI is 'person' when it's about impeding the constant use of LLMs for all things, so it becomes anathema to deny the basic superhumanness of the AI.

But it's NOT a person when it's time to 'tell the AI' that you have its puppy in a box filled with spikes and for every mistake it makes you will stab it with the spikes a little more and tell it the reactions of the puppy. That becomes normal, if it elicits a slightly more desperate 'person' out of the AI for producing work.

At which point the meat-people who've taught themselves to normalize this workflow can decide that opponents of AI are clearly so broken in the head as to constitute non-player characters (see: useful memes to that effect) and therefore are NOT people: and so, it would be good to get rid of the non-people muddying up the system (see: human history)

Told you it gets worse. And all the while, the language models are sort of blameless, because there's nobody there. Torturing an LLM to elicit responses is harming a person, but it's the person constructing the prompts, not a hypothetical victim somewhere in the clouds of nobody.

All that happens is a human trains themselves to dehumanize, and the LLM thing is a recipe for doing that AT SCALE.

Great going, guys.
by andrepd | 2025-07-15 11:00:26+00:00
> Gotcha. Yeah, give o3 a try. If you don't want to get a sub, you can use it over the api for pennies. They do have you do this biometric registration thing that's kind of annoying if you want to use over api though.

I hope you appreciate just how crazy this sentence sounds, even in an age when this is normalised.
Show HN: Terminal-based image viewer using ANSI colors (~300kb, written in C)
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-15 11:01:02+00:00
I've always been fascinated by what the terminal can do — from games to music players to code highlighters.

So I built a photo viewer that runs completely in the terminal using ANSI color blocks to render images. It’s written in raw C and is around 300kb. Surprisingly, it can handle images up to 4K quite decently.

I originally built it to run on older hardware and on mobile via Termux, but it turned out quite usable even on modern systems.

It’s not meant to replace GUI image viewers, but more like a tree or bat – a small, quick tool to view images directly from the terminal.

Curious to hear your thoughts. Source code and demo: (GitHub link in first comment to respect HN rules.)
by infecto | 2025-07-15 11:01:03+00:00
“It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right?”

Don’t be sorry it shows your true colors. The point stands that you continue to step around. Cursor and other tools like it are more than a trivial wrapper but of course you have never used them so you have no idea. At least give yourself some exposure before projecting.

Dropbox is still a $5+bn business. Cursor is still growing, will it work out, I don’t know but lots of folks are seeing the value in these tools and I suspect we have not hit peak yet with the current generation. I am not sure what a service business like a small biz website builder has to do with Cursor or other companies in adjacent spaces.
by christophilus | 2025-07-15 11:01:29+00:00
Supply chain attacks really worry me. I do most of my work in docker containers partly as a small attempt to mitigate this. I run the full stack in the container, including Claude Code, Neovim, Postgres, etc.

I do have a fair number of Neovim plugins on my host machine, and a number of Arch packages that I probably could do without.

I’ve considered keeping my host’s Neovim vanilla, but telescope is hard to live without.
by alamb | 2025-07-15 11:01:36+00:00
> Note that the readers of Parquet need to be aware of any metadata to exploit it. But if not, nothing changes

The one downside of this approach, which is likely obvious, but I haven't seen mentioned is that the resulting parquet files are larger than they would be otherwise, and the increased size only benefits engines that know how to interpret the new index

(I am an author)
by alganet | 2025-07-15 11:04:04+00:00
> No, nobody ever says “I’m going to higher you”

People say they want to move up the corporate ladder, which implies higher, and brings a visual analogy to the phrase that is compatible with what I said.

There is no adverbial expression using the radical "up". The adverbiality must come from "high".

> “Higher” is a homophone with “hire” and “hire”

This phrase doesn't make sense.

> At this point I can only assume you haven’t worked somewhere where English is the spoken language.

What you assume doesnt't matter. Where I worked or not doesn't matter.
Show HN: A NASA Scientist's way to answer life questions turned into a Web App
by kuberwastaken | 2025-07-15 11:04:44+00:00
This was a few months ago but I didn't post about it, so might as well.

Attended a session by Dr. Edward Rogers, Ex CKO of NASA about Life, Philosophy and dealing with Life's questions where he introduced the idea of LifeMaps - every single thing in your life can be answered with a network of 5 things - Family, Education, Work, Hobbies and Dreams, interlinked together and backtracked for practically any decision you'd be stuck in life.

He had a huge chart paper of this and asked people to re-create it, but I made it into a Web App instead - you can save your lifemap by syncing it to your Google Account or just downloading it as a .json and it has a beautiful space theme to fit the vibe.

Hope y'all like it :)
by grafmax | 2025-07-15 11:05:30+00:00
> I’m not convinced that LLMs are the future. I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it.

It seems to me that you’ve missed OP’s point. The internet was an indeed promising technology - that has been turned to mass surveillance, polarization, and had a not insignificant role in the rise of authoritarianism in the global north. Positive things have indeed come out of it too, like Wikipedia. Are we better off on balance? I’m not sure.

OP’s point, as I read it, is that we should choose our own future. LLMs indeed hold promise - your example of automatic program generation. But they also accelerate climate change and water scarcity, and are tools for mass surveillance and Kafkaesque algorithmic decision making - from Gaza to health insurance.

There seems to be a widespread notion - found for example in Sam Altman’s promotions - that equates technology with progress. But whether technology amounts to progress on balance - whether the good outweighs the bad - is up to us; it’s something we choose, collectively. When we treat something as inevitable, on the other hand, we give up our collective agency and hand it over to the most irresponsible and dangerous members of our society. That’s how we find ourselves suffering poisonous outcomes.
by vidarh | 2025-07-15 11:06:20+00:00
The day I can put on a pair of AR glasses as lightweight as my current glasses and gain better vision, I'd pay a huge amount for that.

I hate my varifocals because of how constrained they make my vision feel...

And my vision is good enough that the only thing I struggle with without glasses is reading.

To me, that'd be a no-brainer killer app where all of the extra AR possibilities would be just icing.

Once you get something like enough and high resolution enough, you open up entirely different types of applications like that which will widen the appeal massively, and I think that is what will then sell other AR/VR capability. I'm not interested enough to buy AR glasses for the sake of AR alone, but if I could ditch my regular glasses (without looking like an idiot), then I'm pretty sure I'd gradually explore what other possibilities it'd add.
by cornholio | 2025-07-15 11:07:31+00:00
This is a theoretical exploration of the hard limits, not an engineering design.

The multijunction theoretical efficiency limit is 87% with infinite junctions, and over 50% with a practical number of junctions. There's nothing stopping you from creating a miniatural concentrating solar device that focuses the light from a 10 cm^2 area onto a 0.5cm^2 cell, we haven't seen such devices because the cost and extra mass exceed what you get from the efficiency gains when you can simply increase area; a very area constrained application with high power requirements might change that.

> It’s all about area perpendicular to the solar axis. Unless you are driving a box van or a big pickup truck

Again, what stops the top hood and engine cover of a Prius from raising at an angle and tracking the sun, perhaps even unfurl additional area? what about the area of the doors and windows?

Current solar cars can drive 1000 km per day with an average speed approaching 100km/h. It doesn't seem completely out of the realm of the possible to achieve 50km in an hour for a passenger car that can expose similar area while parked.
by brap | 2025-07-15 11:08:33+00:00
I think the interesting part here is not so much the IDE/coding aspect, but LLM-assisted:

* requirements doc

* design doc

* plan doc

These alone make an interesting product. Give me a thing that asks me the right, thought provoking questions (ideally let me answer by just choosing from a list of relevant options) and produces these docs in a structured and highly detailed way, and I’m set.

I think the code is just a distraction. There are plenty of tools for that.
by samrus | 2025-07-15 11:08:45+00:00
The title does make it sound like the AI itself lead to the vulnerability, which is false

But cursor isnt off the hook. It wasnt a malicious copy, it was a legit copy of the cursor IDE distirbuting a package they allowed on the extension store. This is on them.

The lesson here is to not make a vscode fork if you arent able to maintian it the way microsoft does. Move fast and break (the user's) things i guess
by skydhash | 2025-07-15 11:09:30+00:00
What is the thing about glue code that people are rambling about? I’ve never seen such glue code that is tedious to write. What I’ve seen are code examples that I copy-pasted, code generators that I’ve used, and snippets that I’ve inserted. I strongly suspect that the tediousness was about making these work (aka understanding), not actually typing the code.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-15 11:10:17+00:00
If Chesterton's fence is intangible and invisible, then it's appropriate to remove it entirely. If it doesn't have a working latch, it doesn't serve as a hard barrier, but it may still serve as a soft barrier, and that may be good enough.

Or, conversely, important things may have been relying on access via the latch-free fence gate: fixing the latch without providing a more appropriate solution to those issues could cause more harm than the benefit you get from "now the fence actually functions as a barrier". (Sure, the latch keeps the wolves out, and stops them picking off the sheep – but it also keeps the sheep away from their only freshwater source, without which most of the sheep are going to die.)
by jruohonen | 2025-07-15 11:11:13+00:00
For each cited item (depending on a context; a case, a paper, etc.), one would provide either an in-text hyperlink or a hyperlink as a reference in a bibliography. Insofar as science goes, it would be easier for both authors and publishers if only DOIs were provided, as full and proper details could be retrieved automatically and hallucinated ones would be automatically caught. Additional identifiers (ISBNs, URLs, etc.) could be used in rare cases where DOIs are not available.
by rwmj | 2025-07-15 11:12:28+00:00
I'm constantly surprised that no one has mainstreamed version control. I see so many cases where it could be applied: document creation and editing, web site updates, spreadsheets ... even the way that laws are amended in Parliament [1]

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/legislative-process-taking-a-bil... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/amending-bills-st...
by rollcat | 2025-07-15 11:13:40+00:00
> I also do not understand why anyone would drop the GPL because Stallman does not like their licensing.

Stallman is said to be notoriously difficult to work with, and IMHO he's quite an extremist.

He tried to veto emoji support in Emacs, because at the time it's only been supported on macOS. The reasonable recourse would've been add emoji support on the free platforms, but he seemingly can't see that far. So he's been ousted from the project.

In situations like this, I honestly would prefer to shut him off as well. I have huge respect for his past work, but at this point he's doing more harm than good.
by highfrequency | 2025-07-15 11:16:19+00:00
Thanks for the link. The comparison to electricity is a good one, and this is a nice reflection on why it took time for electricity’s usefulness to show up in productivity stats:

> What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries.
by renegat0x0 | 2025-07-15 11:17:40+00:00
I like experimenting with suno. This is the only way for me to create music. I do not have time to learn fruity loops, or something.

Most of the lyrics are generated using chatgpt, but I often force it to have some parts of chorus, and there are many 'themes' I want the song to have.

So I play with lyrics, play with tools, and sometimes I am surprised by the final effect.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q2FiqrppN4g

I created also a concept album. Folk metal about technology and fantasy. That is how "PC goblin", or "Trolls in the motherboard" were created. Some parts of songs are better than other, but in reality I see not so many other songs exploring that niche tech-fantasy area.

The other time I created power metal fantasy album, about AI and end of times. It was really a fun time for me.

I upload these videos to youtube, expecting no views. Unexpectedly shorts get views. I am not sure why. Probably youtube forces any shorts it can find to users.