MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryao | 2025-07-16 16:37:53+00:00
I had recently looked up “wrong” to check out of curiosity, and DuckDuckGo only said it was an adjective, so I had stopped using it as an adverb. It turns out that the dictionary states it is an adverb, but you need to click to go to an actual dictionary to see that since the definition given by DuckDuckGo is only a partial definition. Thanks for making me double check.

That said, I read dozens of English books per year. I am well past the point of diminishing returns for benefits from more reading in English. Reading more books only increases my reading speed , which I have noticed is now 2 to 4 times faster than others around me.
by wrasee | 2025-07-16 16:38:00+00:00
So refreshing isn’t it? It’s like having an OS that’s actually designed for you, not them. Imagine!

Occasionally I will boot into a Windows partition because I have to do something windows-only. I’m so out of the Windows world these days that I mentally have to prepare myself not to get too fired up with it all, just calm down do the thing and get out. :)

Agree that it’s a lot of effort to switch though, so good for you on making the switch!
by tombert | 2025-07-16 16:38:14+00:00
I gave a talk recently at a conference about how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, and that the worst part of Java is Java developers, who seem to be completely intellectually unambitious.

I don’t think Java makes anyone unambitious, I think it’s that Java is taught in schools and unambitious people don’t feel the need to learn anything else, and they get jobs at unambitious corporations. It selection-biases towards unambitious people who don’t want to learn more than they have to.

Compare this to something like Clojure or Haskell or something, which isn’t routinely taught at schools and is not very employable. People who learn these languages generally seek out these things because they’re interested in it. This selection-biases towards intellectually ambitious people.

As a result, Java people can be insufferable for people like me.

The people who make Java have actually made the platform and language pretty ok in the last two decades, but I had to fight at a previous job to use NIO, which I think was introduced in Java 4, but none of my coworkers had really heard of it or used it because the regular Java blocking IO has been “good enough”.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-16 16:38:27+00:00
I think it comes down to how we define creativity for the purpose of this conversation. I would say that 100% of situations and problems are novel to some degree - the real world does not exactly repeat, and your brain at T+10 is not exactly the same as it is as T+20.

That said, I think most everyday situations are similar enough to things we've experienced before that shallow pattern matching is all it takes. The curve in the road we're driving on may not be 100% the same as any curve we've experienced before, but turning the car wheel to the left the way we've learnt do do it will let us successfully navigate it all the same.

Most everyday situations/problems we're faced with are familiar enough that shallow "reactive" behavior is good enough - we rarely have to stop to develop a plan, figure things out, or reason in any complex kind of a way, and very rarely face situations so challenging that any real creativity is needed.
by fuck_AI | 2025-07-16 16:38:28+00:00
Microsoft <3 Linux so much, they ruined Windows so people would switch to Linux. Thank you Microsoft!

Seriously though, I switched to Linux late last year and haven't looked back. It has everything I need for a computer and a lot of the "problems" people say is holding them back from switching full-time are greatly exaggerated. Like if you're not willing to make some small compromises so you can have a computer that respects you as a human and not a metric then I don't know what to tell you.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-16 16:38:37+00:00
> Render Passes are entirely pointless complexity that should not exist. It's even optional in Vulkan nowadays.

AFAIK Vulkan only eliminated pre-baked render pass objects (which were indeed pointless), and now simply copied Metal's design of transient render passes, e.g. there's still 'render pass boundaries' between vkCmdBeginRendering() and vkCmdEndRendering() and the VkRenderingInfo struct that's passed into the vkCmdBeginRendering() function (https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/latest/man/html/Vk...) is equivalent with Metal's MTLRenderPassDescriptor (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlrenderpas...).

E.g. even modern Vulkan still has render passes, they just didn't want to call those new functions 'Begin/EndRenderPass' for some reason ;) AFAIK the idea of render pass boundaries is quite essential for tiler GPUs.

WebGPU pretty much tries to copy Metal's render pass approach as much as possible (e.g. it doesn't have pre-baked pass objects like Vulkan 1.0).

> The one thing that WebGPU is doing better is that it does implicit syncing by default.

AFAIK also mostly thanks to the 'transient render pass model'.

> Why would I need that anyway, the shader/kernel knows all about the data, the host doesnt need to know.

Because old GPUs are a thing and those usually don't have such a flexible hardware design to make rasterizing (or even vertex pulling) in compute shaders performant enough to compete with the traditional render pipeline.

> Similarly static binding groups are entirely pointless

I agree, but AFAIK Vulkan's 1.0 descriptor model is mostly to blame for the inflexible BindGroups design.

> but that's also made needlessly cumbersome in WebGPU due to the requirement to use staging buffers

Most modern 3D APIs also switched to staging buffers though, and I guess there's not much choice if you don't have unified memory.
by rglullis | 2025-07-16 16:40:04+00:00
> a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global mean.

But they are all sharing the same world. It's all the same ecosystem.

My objection is not because I am against people trying to do something different. My objection is to this delusional idea that this work needs to be isolated from everyone else. It's sterile at best and elitist at worst.
by leptons | 2025-07-16 16:40:05+00:00
>It is probably 90% rote pattern matching.

So what. 90% (or more) of humans aren't making any sort of breakthrough in any discipline, either. 99.9999999999% of human speech/writing isn't producing "breakthroughs" either, it's just a way to communicate.

>It's just ironic how human-like the flaws of the system are. (Hallucinations that are asserting untrue facts, just because they are plausible from a pattern matching POV)

The LLM is not "hallucinating". It's just operating as it was designed to do, which often produces results that do not make any sense. I have actually hallucinated, and some of those experiences were profoundly insightful, quite the opposite of what an LLM does when it "hallucinates".

You can call anything a "breakthrough" if you aren't aware of prior art. And LLMs are "trained" on nothing but prior art. If an LLM does make a "breakthrough", then it's because the "breakthrough" was already in the training data. I have no doubt many of these "breakthroughs" will be followed years later by someone finding the actual human-based research that the LLM consumed in its training data, rendering the "breakthrough" not quite as exciting.
by gpm | 2025-07-16 16:40:17+00:00
Not so, there is no obligation on copyright owners to sell at a reasonable price. If you want to create a derivative work that the copyright holder ideologically disagrees with it is very likely that it is simply impossible to purchase the rights to do so. Nor is there any obligation for the copyright owner to make themselves known and available to negotiate with, there are numerous things that aren't available at any price because no one even knows who has the right to sell them (many old games for instance fall into this category).

Moreover it is simply unacceptable to say that poor people (which in many cases here means less than multi millionaires given the minimum deal size most copyright holders are interested in for derivative works - and less than centi-millionaires if we mean "affordably as a hobby") cannot legally engage with the work of the culture they grew up in.
by munificent | 2025-07-16 16:40:22+00:00
I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World.

Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experiences are just as valid.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-16 16:40:35+00:00
> It's the feelings I get when I look at it.

I'd agree. But those and the monetary worth are often related. The Mona Lisa's original is worth a lot, in part, because of human feelings about it being The Real One.

My kids made some art in kindergarten I treasure to this day. I would probably not treasure a mass-produced perfect copy of it; if I saw one in Target it wouldn't be worth a dollar to me.
by huhkerrf | 2025-07-16 16:40:39+00:00
Not surprising that a magazine that has been called a $12,000 espresso machine turned into a periodical only mentions iPhone apps, but if you're an Android, there are also a lot of good apps for this.

For locking you out of apps based on time, location, or usage, Lock Me Out is really good. You can get most of what you need out of it without paying anything, which can't be said for a lot of the others. (Am I really going to pay a subscription for this? Yuck.)

I couple it with Olauncher, which also doesn't need a subscription.

I'm not affiliated with either, but just those that have worked well for me.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-16 16:40:48+00:00
To be honest, that reads less like details on what's missing to port x11, and more like a frustrated exchange between a project author who's clearly stating what the project cannot do, and an overly enthusiastic member of the community who's vastly underestimated the amount of work required to run x11.

Credit to the authors patience throughout that exchange, though. I've had similar exchanges with some of my open source projects too. It's great when people do want to try things but it can cost the author a lot of time and effort helping people on endeavors that you already know will fail and already know it isn't where you're time should be spent. And can be particularly frustrating when you know those participants are unlikely to contribute any code that would further the project's goals. But you still have to show them courtesy because the last thing you want to do is kill their enthusiasm for open source.
by bunderbunder | 2025-07-16 16:41:11+00:00
Java shops are certainly where I've witnessed the most disdain for Python. IME the strongest feelings tend to come from people who didn't actually have any significant experience with Python, and perhaps don't even have much practical experience with any language that isn't Java. So they tended to consider it to be objectively inferior purely because it's interpreted and dynamically typed.

At a previous job I did manage to put a chip in that when I demonstrated replacing one of our Java services with a Python implementation. It was a fraction of the code, and achieved much better latency and throughput. Obviously not every Python program is going to do that. But my point isn't that Python is better, it's that these kinds of things are never so cut-and-dried. Many non-trivial Python programs are just thin shells around a large core of very well-optimized and battle-tested C/C++/Rust code. And Java, for its part, can also accumulate a lot of dynamic language-style performance losses to pointer chasing and run-time type lookups (and GC churn) if you're not careful about how you use generics. As always, the devil's in the details. It's also less able to pull the "actually I'm a C++" trick because using a compacting garbage collector makes it difficult to interop with native code without paying a hefty marshaling tax.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-16 16:42:00+00:00
As a nix user, you hardly need to know uv, but you might later need to know how to work together with non-nix-users who use uv. It's easy.

There will be a file: uv.lock You can use uv2nix to get a single nix package for all the project's python dependencies, which you can then add to your devshell like anything else you find in nixpkgs (e.g. right alongside uv itself). It ends up being two or three lines of code to actually get the package, but you can just point a LLM at the uv2nix docs and at your flake.nix and it'll figure them out for you.

Your devshell will then track with changes that other devs make to that project's dependencies. If you want to modify them...

edit pyproject.toml # package names and versions uv lock # map names and versions to hashes (nix needs hashes, finds them in uv.lock) nix flake lock # update flake.lock based on uv.lock nix develop # now your devshell has it too

This way you're not maintaining separate sources of truth for what the project depends on, and the muggles need not think about your nix wizardy at all.
by strcat | 2025-07-16 16:42:06+00:00
> It is blatantly immoral to say that a person's life should be valued more because of they are a software developer or because of the software they produce, or that it should be protected more than the lives of other people.

We never said anything about his life being worth more than others. We posted an appeal to Ukraine's military leadership explaining his value to their war effort with the goal of keeping our friend safe. What's the problem with that?

> And it doesn't make a life one iota more valuable than anyone else's.

What's the problem with trying to keep our friend safe in a way that helps Ukraine to defend themselves?
by kentonv | 2025-07-16 16:42:20+00:00
> and when they make a change that breaks the existing API contract it always makes for several miserable days for me

If we changed an API in Workers in a way that broke any Worker in production, we consider that an incident and we will roll it back ASAP. We really try to avoid this but sometimes it's hard for us to tell. Please feel free to contact us if this happens in the future (e.g. file a support ticket or file a bug on workerd on GitHub or complain in our Discord or email kenton@cloudflare.com).
by passivegains | 2025-07-16 16:42:27+00:00
I was going to reply about how New Zealand is as far from almost everywhere else as the US, but I found out something way more interesting: Other than servers in Australia and New Zealand itself, the closest ones actually are in the US, just 3,000km north in American Samoa. Basically right next door. (I need to go back to work before my boss walks by and sees me screwing around on Google Maps, but I'm pretty sure the next closest are in French Polynesia.)
by cogman10 | 2025-07-16 16:42:28+00:00
Step 3 is where I've seen my org completely fall on its face.

Yes, the golden path is "fully supported" yet after a year or two the company executive swoop in and say "why are we spending so much money on the golden path" and slowly, but surely, the support for is whittled away into nothing until the golden path is out of date and actively punishing anyone that chose to use it.

For example, one of our golden paths was a UX framework built on top of standard web tech for the time. The team maintaining that framework is no more and it's now very far out of date. Adopting it means you are pulling in Angular circa 2016 and that you'll be dealing with incompatibilities between that and any new web component you want to start using.
by freedomben | 2025-07-16 16:42:36+00:00
I had another thought on this that might be where the disconnect is. When I say it adds value, I'm not saying equivalent value. AI generated Shakespeare or Star Trek etc wouldn't (likely) be the same value as the originals, but they add some value, even if that value is just a couple hours of entertainment for a single individual. Part of the beauty of AI is the empowerment it will give to the individual that previously required huge amounts of investment and work by professionals, which necessitated that films/books/etc be widely marketable and economical. Even consider the difference between 1930s films and films today where originally it was "mass appeal to all audiences" but now there is a ton of variety for all sorts of different tastes. When AI gets to the point it can produce stuff people actually want to watch, the potential for hyper customization is huge. I don't think that will eliminate broadly appealing productions as we humans still love to share and talk about what we watched, and jump on bandwagons for the shared culture (Severance being a good example haha), but it will add more arrows to our quivers.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-16 16:43:05+00:00
And yet it is lots of fun to debug on Android.

We only need to open chrome://gpu and see how many workarounds are implementated.

Those that happen to own a device where workarounds are yet to be implemented, have quite interesting experiences, depending on the root cause.

As this is an increasing list across Chrome releases.

Lets see how it works out there with Firefox and Safari, the later still not fully WebGL 2.0 compliant.

So much for the watertightness.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-16 16:43:53+00:00
The article does a decent job eventually of explaining a use-case in the section "Confirming that altermagnets exist".

Seems you can store information at high density in electron spin in materials where spins are naturally organized. However, so far the only suitable materials have been ferromagnets, which have macroscopic magnetic fields that make using them a nightmare. The new altermagnets have suitably organized spins but the atoms alternate their magnetic fields so there is no net magnetism from the material and they are easier to work with.
by tmiku | 2025-07-16 16:44:06+00:00
> I helped to recover my nearby hospital as a volunteer when it was ransomwared.

I'm curious about how you got in the door here. Very cool, but isn't healthcare IT notoriously cagey about access? I've had to do PHI training and background checks before getting into the system at my (admittedly only 2) PHI-centered jobs.

Granted, if it was such an emergency, I could see them rushing you through a lite version of the HR onboarding process. Did you have a connection in the hospital through whom you offered your services?
by pegasus | 2025-07-16 16:44:17+00:00
I would expect a lot more variability if this would be the purpose. For example, instead of corner balls, why not be a little creative and make them cones. Also, the holes in the faces always being of different sizes is peculiar. Then there's the icosahedron with balls of different sizes. Reading the wikipedia page only deepens the sense of mystery, but some use in astrological divination or the like seems most plausible to me.
by Glyptodon | 2025-07-16 16:44:20+00:00
I don't disagree that misalignment between the sexes might have some influence, but crass men who seem to think women are basically fertility slaves is wildly toxic, wildly dangerous, and only reinforces feminism.

In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes.

But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.
by closewith | 2025-07-16 16:44:30+00:00
Asking for this specific developer to be protected is different to asking that they be assigned where would they provide the greatest operational benefit (which may or may not be a position of greater safety).

The former is morally reprehensible and an insult to the families of the war dead.

If this is not clear to you, I think some self reflection is in order.
by imtringued | 2025-07-16 16:44:31+00:00
I would agree if manufacturers bothered to provide machine readable data sheets [0]. If you have to read the data sheet and manually write your component definitions, then this won't be much faster than doing it with a GUI.

[0] To be fair I'm not a professional electrical engineer, maybe there are expensive databases that I don't have access to. I personally always thought that EDA tools have a natural business opportunity where they give you the razor for free (the EDA software) and sell you the razor blades (e.g. part libraries).
Show HN: Photo Maps View for OneDrive
by ljw1004 | 2025-07-16 16:44:51+00:00
Hello, HN.

Over the past three decades, my camera photo collection has grown to almost a terabyte, all on OneDrive. I've been wanting a way to view it all on a map, to filter by date/keyword, and to do so on my desktop.

So I wrote "Geopic for Onedrive" to show all my photos on a map. It's a small hobby project, all open source. I'd love for people to try it out! or fork it to self-host, or make it run off your own collections other than OneDrive.

(If you're someone who pays to keep your photos on Apple iCloud then you can use map view on their app; if you pay for Google Photos then likewise, but I pay for OneDrive which lacks a map view).

Some fun coding observations: 1. OneDrive gives you thumbnail URLs where the URL itself is 1.8k on average (because of all the authentication token stuff). But you encode the thumbnail jpeg content as a "data" url then it comes out to just 2.0k average, and saves the network trip! 2. Google Map's "MarkerClusterer" library doesn't handle more than about 10,000 markers: it gets slower, and locks up the browser beyond about 15k markers. I wrote my own simple clusterer, a naive iteration over every single photo, and Chrome handles 100k markers fine in 15ms.

This was my first foray into AI coding assistants. It's been a mystery to me how other people are using AI, so I figured I'd share a log of every single user prompt I typed into Claude Code over about 10% of the project: https://github.com/ljw1004/geopic/blob/main/transcript.txt
by vinhatson | 2025-07-16 16:45:15+00:00
This dissertation introduces a novel theoretical framework to reinterpret quantum tunneling, proposing that particles traverse energy barriers by slipping through dynamic, microscopic "spatial cracks" rather than by wave penetration. Grounded in the Linear Observation Entanglement Hypothesis (LOEH), we posit that these cracks, anchored by a static filter ((T_k)) and oscillating with a temporal rhythm ((\tau(t))), form a universal lattice structure within space-time. An experimental methodology is presented to measure these cracks by aggregating tunneling outcomes, yielding an estimated crack volume of (v_n \approx 10^{-30} \text{m}^3) and a density of (\rho_v \approx 10^{30} \text{m}^{-3}). We further theorize that by traversing a sequence of these cracks, a particle's effective velocity ((v_{eff})) can exceed the speed of light, enabling information time travel by acting as micro-wormholes. This work extends LOEH to a theory of space-time manipulation, offering a new paradigm for understanding quantum reality.
by cestith | 2025-07-16 16:45:16+00:00
Tilck is a small and deterministic monokernel that currently implements around 100 Linux syscalls in a Linux-compatible way. It’s a good educational tool, but is planned to be a Linux-compatible RTOS kernel. It currently supports statically linked binaries built against musl and boots and runs in about 3 megs of RAM.

One of the goals is to be small enough and simple enough of a codebase to be useful for educational purposes. Another is to eventually be useful in production in embedded systems.