MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exiguus | 2025-07-30 20:42:09+00:00
What fascinates me about the World Wide Web is that all the technology is open, and the specifications are open. This includes everything from BIND, Apache, and Gecko to codecs and the operating systems that run the web, as well as all the working groups of the W3C and their specifications. You can teach yourself everything. You can read the specifications, implement them, and even improve them. You can create your own software and share it with others. You can build your own website, host it on a server, and make it accessible to the world.

For me, this is the essence of the World Wide Web: it is open and accessible to everyone. It makes knowledge accessible to everyone in the world, regardless of how poor, educated, or disabled you are. It's kind of a communist utopia, where everyone can participate and contribute.

Now, why do I write this and use the term "communist utopia"? Because I think that the World Wide Web is a great example of how open standards and open technology can create a better world. Even when capitalism tries to take over the web, it is still a place where everyone can participate and contribute.

And this brings me to the point of this article: Telling people what not to do and what to do when sharing content is, in my opinion, not the way to go. Instead, we should focus on how to make the web a better place for everyone. We should focus on how to make it more accessible, more inclusive, and more open. We should focus on how to make it a place where everyone can participate and contribute freely. And by freely, I mean without losing your autonomy or paying with private information.
by benreesman | 2025-07-30 20:42:13+00:00
I've been meaning to switch to GUI emacs for 15 years, I usually have it working, vterm is nifty... but it just works great in the terminal and with terminals getting SO FUCKING GREAT lately, eh, is it really an upgrade? WezTerm and ghostty on Wayland with no X jank? Accelerated, ligatures, mouse and keyboard clipboard integration, high-DPI...

Can GUI anything keep up?
by hadlock | 2025-07-30 20:42:14+00:00
Earlier this year I was able to struggle-bus together my own bootable rust binary (and bootloader in assembly!) on QEMU in a couple of hours using his blog as a guide. It seems the LLMs have definitely scraped his blog, as if you go off the happy path they're absolutely useless in this endeavor, and few other resources on the topic exist.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-30 20:42:28+00:00
> It makes me shudder to think about code that is written in such a manner.

Often it has the property which was good enough for generations of C and C++ programmers, it compiles. Does it work? Eh. Do the tests, if there even are tests, check anything useful? Eh.

The focus on "it doesn't matter so long as it compiles" justifies everything up to IFNDR†, the explicit choice in C++ that if what you've written is nonsense but it would not be easy to modify the compiler to notice, just don't worry about it and say it's somebody else's problem.

† "Ill-formed, No Diagnostic Required" these words or near equivalent occur frequently in the ISO definition of the language.
by rayiner | 2025-07-30 20:42:32+00:00
This is a problem with Emacs on virtually every GUI platform. Emacs insists that it owns the main loop, while most GUI frameworks insist that they own the main loop. Emacs wants to slurp some events from a queue-like thing, throw some drawing at another queue-like thing, then wait for another event. The GUI instead wants to call back into Emacs whenever an event comes in.

All that being said, Emacs has always worked pretty well for me on Mac. I use Emacs and PDFgrep to spelunk through multi-GBs of PDFs and it is faster than almost anything else.
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-30 20:42:46+00:00
Ridiculous. Would we have had a similar ban against flash video and game websites growing up if it were today? Against AOL Instant Messenger?

I already had a local net nanny software to contend with, if the government had also tried preventing me from participating in online culture, assuming I didn't kill myself because of a lack of escape from my abusive situation, I would 100% have ended up being an absolute menace to the government in defiance and retaliation.

I would have opened myself up to fraud charges creating accounts with private information from adults. And once I was over the wall of censorship, I'd only find adults and other criminally-minded children. I'd be on a conveyor belt to more serious crimes. Is that what we want the next generation of computer enthusiasts to grow up with?
by mandevil | 2025-07-30 20:43:05+00:00
Wealth inequality is intensely fractal, at every level it is enormous: someone at the 90th %ile household (there are 15 million of these), making 178k (1), can mostly imagine what someone at the 97th %ile, making 350k, would live like (there are 4.6 million of these), but someone at the 99th %, making 663k would be harder to imagine, and someone at the 99.9th %ile, making 3.2 million a year is basically impossible, and the 1500 taxpaying units at the 99.99th %ile, making 85 million a year is simply out of the frame of reality.

1: All stats are 2022 tax year, and are AGI per tax return, so excluding things like 401(k), based on https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat... and defining household as "taxpaying unit"- e.g. married filing separately would count as two, at two separate levels of income
by amluto | 2025-07-30 20:43:14+00:00
I would go one step farther: I bet that plenty of humans could pass the test that the birds were subjected to at 120Hz or even higher. They didn't test whether the birds could actually resolve stimuli at high temporal resolution -- they tested whether the birds could detect flicker. A bright source pulsed at 120Hz is easily perceptible (and incredibly annoying), especially if it's a square wave with a duty cycle that isn't especially high.

Where are the control animals?
by m348e912 | 2025-07-30 20:43:25+00:00
The one good thing about OMAD is that you can basically eat as much as you want and what you want during that one hour, and as long as that the only time you eat you will likely stay lean. I truly believe that this is the strategy that competitive eater/youtuber beardmeatsfood uses to stay lean while eating an immense amount of food in one sitting.

I have been toying with a 8 hour eating window followed by ~40 hours fasting (basically an evening + a whole day) of not eating, and seen some positive results.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-30 20:43:25+00:00
> So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere

No, they only made it more painful to get into the city streets by car. And probably not by much, as it only matters if you are not stuck in traffic or waiting at a red light. Helsinki is a walkable city with good public transport, cars are not the only option.

> Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”

Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles. And if it results in traffic deaths going down to zero, that's not a weak excuse. Still not a fan of "automatic speed enforcement" for a variety of reasons, but mass surveillance is not one of them.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-30 20:43:26+00:00
I guess it depends? The "refactor" stuff, if your IDE or language server can handle it, then yeah I find the LLM slower for sure. But there are other cases than an LLM helps a lot.

I was writing some URL canonicalization logic yesterday. Because we rolled this out as an MVP, customers put URLs in all sorts of ways and we stored it into the DB. My initial pass at the logic failed on some cases. Luckily URL canonicalization is pretty trivially testable. So I took the most used customers from our DB, send them to Claude and told Claude to come up with the "minimum spanning test cases" that cover this behavior. This took maybe 5-10 sec. I then told Zed's agent mode using Opus to make me a test file and use these test cases to call my function. I audited the test cases and ended up removing some silly ones. I iterated on my logic and that was that. Definitely faster than having to do this myself.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-30 20:43:53+00:00
> the cost of housing goes up without creating economic value for anyone

This is kinda wrong. It does create value for the people who are loaning out the money that the working class uses to purchase the houses. Of course, in this context that value goes straight to the hands of bankers and never leaves but it's worth noting that this situation that the working class hates happens to be rather beneficial to the capital class.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-30 20:44:21+00:00
I have a lot of interest in machines that revisit the 8-bit age but do it better. I like how AVR-8 is really 8-bit but has a lot of registers and a really clean instruction set. I like how the ez80 extends the Z-80 to 24 bit addresses with real 24-bit index registers or how the Commander X16 resolves the contradiction between video and CPU performance, today we can make machines that have the same charm as old machines but clear up the warts and are much much better.
by NetOpWibby | 2025-07-30 20:45:09+00:00
My most recent one was a social network: https://socii.network

Stopped working on it because Mastodon is good enough for me.

I had a Handshake domain registry/registrar: https://neuenet.com

Stopped working on it because Andrew Lee tried to take over the blockchain.

An analytics tool: https://chew.sh

Gauges shut down and I enjoyed that service. My previous domain is now owned by someone who's last name is Chew, which is cool.

Forgot I just let https://design2code.me expire because I didn't put in the work to get my name/services out there.

---

I'm currently working on https://nickel.video and think I'll stick with it for awhile. I also registered https://neue.host a few weeks ago, with the idea that a lot of the side projects I had in the past would actually work as a collection of services.
by quantummagic | 2025-07-30 20:45:38+00:00
I never said it had anything to do with inflation. There are a lot of factors, as I said, geopolitics, demographics, emerging technologies and industrialization, etc. But it is ridiculous to think that supply and demand has nothing to do with where we find ourselves. There are certain fixed or constrained resources (land, etc) that more people are competing for today than ever before. The world population has doubled (or more) since the glory days of the USA, if nothing else.
by jrockway | 2025-07-30 20:45:40+00:00
I don't think there is any danger to running more frequent longer trains. Ultimately you are constrained by the signalling system; nobody is suggesting "just disable the tripcocks and plow through red signals". Modern systems use moving block cab signals, so are set up to succeed with high frequency. (But there are other problems, like terminal capacity, that can limit frequency. The MTA in NYC spent a ton of money giving the L CBTC to run 40+ tph... but the terminal at 8th Ave can't turn that many trains. Until that's fixed, the L will always be overcrowded.)

You can see whether the problem is being cheap or if it's actually a capacity issue. If weekend service sucks but peak hour service is good, then it's just being cheap. If rush hour can't handle passenger volumes, then you need a signal system / automation upgrade. (Or a parallel line!)

As a New Yorker, I'm very jealous of Vancouver's SkyTrain system. ("But NYC has the best metro in North America!!" Maybe...) The NYC subway has a lot of peak hour capacity. I hate traveling at peak hours. So that means I'm always standing in stations waiting 10 minutes for the next train. If I lived in Vancouver, then that would be 3 minutes. Sounds good to me!

I also agree with the author in that I'm not sure what elevated trains did to hurt people. I lived in Chicago next to the L for years. It never bothered me. It's nice to see out the window and look at something while you're in transit. And it's cheaper than building things underground. NYC apparently got rid of its elevated railways because of snow, so that's something to watch out for. But Chicago gets more snow and it does OK. (Having commuted on both systems in the snow, it's a mixed bag. Chicago doesn't shut down, but it's slow as people remember how to deal with snow. NYC can run on snow-free underground tracks, but sometimes the governor is like "fuck it, I'm cancelling all the trains anyway" and then you're just stuck.)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-30 20:45:46+00:00
Yeah, but there is a gaping difference between content for kids (i.e. 12 and under) and content for teenagers.

Most teenage-appropriate content would be enjoyed by adults too (e.g. lots of how-tos, educational content, music, entertainment, etc.) Most adults are not going to be into watching Blues Clues or whatever, which is why YouTube doesn't have to worry about cannibalizing more profitable content/algorithms for adults due to the existence of YouTube Kids.
by soulofmischief | 2025-07-30 20:46:06+00:00
Uh, yea, it is. Teenagers grow up. In just a few short years. Then they become members of the voting group most vulnerable to propaganda and political manipulation. It's the same reason tobacco and alcohol companies love advertising to teens. You're creating a target that can be identified, manipulated and controlled through social reinforcement.

Teens also have more time to connect with others and develop unsanctioned philosophies than adults who work and take care of the household full-time.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-30 20:46:11+00:00
> That I have no where else to go to see the content I want to see smells like a de-facto monopoly.

Not in this case, since the content makers can choose to host the digital files on a computer not owner by Alphabet.

Your situation is simply the content maker betting that it is not worth their time to try to earn a return by hosting on a non Alphabet computer.

But Alphabet is doing nothing to stop the content maker and you from reaching a deal.
by christophilus | 2025-07-30 20:46:30+00:00
I will say that having switched to carnivore made a difference for me. It was hard for me to say no to junk food as a vegan or when on a healthy ”balanced” diet. With carnivore, the cooking is simple, the “no” is obvious, and the satiation lasts a long time.

That said, it’s hard for me to think this is actually a healthy way to eat, after so many years being vegan, and I don’t know what the staying power will be.
by jimt1234 | 2025-07-30 20:46:54+00:00
I had a girlfriend years ago that was an extreme optimist. She was a very intelligent person, very outgoing and very successful. She believed everyone was good, and no one ever did anything bad. We got into an argument once over this exact same thing - she thought she'd won a new laptop from some sort of popup ad; all she had to do was fill out some sort of form with a bunch of private info. I told her it was an obvious scam, and she got really defensive, telling me that I'm always so cynical and if I expect the worst from people, that's all I'm gonna get. I talked her out of submitting the private info to the form, but yeah, I can totally understand how reasonably intelligent people would fall victim to something like that. There's different motivations, but for my ex-girlfriend, it was her refusal to accept that people can be bad (take advantage of others).
by nradov | 2025-07-30 20:46:54+00:00
France no longer has to live with the risk of of a conventional invasion by Germany because France has nuclear weapons now and Germany does not. If a terrorist group was using German territory as a base to launch attacks against France and the German government refused to stop them then I'm pretty sure that France would retaliate kinetically, even if that meant some collateral damage. The USA did this in 2001 when Al Qaeda used Afghanistan as a base; France even assisted with that war.

Geography also matters. Israel is tiny compared to France. Israel has zero strategic depth and population centers could be overrun in a matter of hours if defenses failed. This tends to push their strategic planning towards absolutism. And to be clear I'm not trying to justify Israeli actions, just pointing out the strategic calculus at work and the difficulty of negotiating an agreement acceptable to both sides.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-30 20:47:33+00:00
I expect many of those companies to fail in the 3mo-2y timeline, so in many ways I welcome PHBs to embrace their full stupidity. Same for the people who funded them.

I do feel semi-sorry for anyone who paid for the services by those companies, though. Maybe something good will arise from that too, in the end; for example, it'd be nice if US society taught more critical reading skills to its members.

The interesting game for the non-PHBs among us is figuring out if/how we can use LLMs in less risky ways, and what all is possible there. For example, I'd love to see work put into LLMs helping with formal correctness of software; there's a hard backstop there where either the proof checks or it doesn't. Code changes needed to enable less-painful proofs would hopefully largely be refactorings, where reviews should be easier and it might even work out to fuzz test that the old and new implementations return matching output for same input. Or similarly, LLM-powered test coverage improver that only writes new tests (old school/branch-based/mutation-based, there's plenty of room there).
by dismalaf | 2025-07-30 20:47:36+00:00
You've got it backwards. Hard assets like land, buildings (aka. your house), machinery (a tractor or your car) are all much easier to finance than businesses. A simple Google search gives a wealth of resources for someone looking to finance (aka. mortgage) land and/or property for a farm.

https://www.farmcreditil.com/Products/farm-loans

There's even government grants and loans to help:

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/farm-loan-programs/farm-o...

Edit - we're on HN. If you'd ever tried to get a business loan you'd know it's near impossible for a new business without 100% collateral, which is why the entire venture capital business, and HN, even exists...
by gopher_space | 2025-07-30 20:48:50+00:00
> You have tons of businesses that are viable (produce enough money to support a family) as long as you never load it with debt; because they do NOT produce enough to support a family and the debt load that would come from buying it.

I've been thinking about this situation as "the bakery trap". The labor dimension here is that the best possible career move for the person you've spent the past n years training is to immediately leave once they've mastered your hot-cross bun recipe.
by nicbou | 2025-07-30 20:49:29+00:00
I'm building an insurance business, I guess?

I was not satisfied with the health insurance advice available to immigrants, so I paired up with a broker. When my content and my calculator are not enough, they can reach out to this guy and get a recommendation. I monitor him closely and make sure he prioritises honesty over revenue.

The update was a little too successful and I overwhelmed him with new customers. He's now working long hours to cope with the demand, so we have to build infrastructure to streamline things a bit. We need to automate case tracking, document collection, application with insurance companies, that sort of thing.

My actual job is to write useful guides for immigrants [0], and I find insurance quite boring, but the high commissions and high conversion rate make up for the loss in traffic to ChatGPT and Google AI summaries. It also gives me a lot of insight about the insurance industry, which in turn helps me improve the advice on the website. I get clear data about which insurance options work for visa applications.

If all goes well, I can eventually get back to the stuff I care most about: helping people settle in Germany.

[0] https://allaboutberlin.com
by renewiltord | 2025-07-30 20:49:34+00:00
Admittedly this would have been an exotic for the Bay Area but mundane for elsewhere use-case since we just needed really fast disk and fast compute because we just ran model tuning and backtesting on the machines. 90% utilization, 100G network, 4xNVMe. We only had an 8-member team so much of the management/IT-layer replacement stuff that Oxide enables wouldn't have been as high leverage across the tens of thousands of cores. We almost certainly left a lot of stuff on the table, though.

Also, is your username something interesting? It feels familiar but a quick `echo -n '' | md5sum` didn't yield anything.
by thesz | 2025-07-30 20:50:15+00:00
> if we run a system for smaller trains, we can build smaller stations for these trains, saving a huge amount on station costs. This costs us in reduced total capacity, but this can easily be made up for by increasing train frequency.

There is a safe minimal distance between trains, in fact, a safe distance for a given speed. Shorter trains are not exempt from obeying it. You can make shorter trains more frequent at the expense of lowering traveling speed.

What is the cap of throughput is due to these speed limitations is an exercise left for the author of the article.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-30 20:50:27+00:00
I made a very simple, testable claim there.

1) The claim was the situation was dire, starvation imminent.

2) Israel cut off the supplies while restructuring the system.

3) That didn't result in a bunch of bodies.

#2 is undisputed. Just look at the news about #1, I can not see this as reasonably disputed. That leaves only #3. Hamas doesn't show any inability to get their claims out, thus why in the world should I think there's a bunch of people dead of starvation.

If I'm breaking it down wrong, show where. If you disagree with any of the subpoints, show where.
by technothrasher | 2025-07-30 20:50:51+00:00
I've got a coworker who fell for, "You won a free electric drill from Home Depot! Click here and enter your credit card". I discovered his predicament when he was telling me how he managed to get an overseas vendor to agree to reduce a credit card charge he didn't recognize in half. That got me to pull a bit on the thread and the whole story unraveled. What it came down to, apparently, was simple gullibility. He didn't know if the drill prize was legit, but he just didn't think he would be targeted in a scam, so he figured, "Why not? Worst that happens is I don't get my drill."
by bredren | 2025-07-30 20:50:57+00:00
Pardon, the self quote, but I pointed toward this four years ago:

> Presumably all older media will eventually get updated to whatever contemporary standard exists.

> For example, the entire series of Saved by the Bell in 4k using the latest AI.

> I wonder how long until we have 2D media that is turned into fully 3D experiences where you can go into the scenes and watch them from any angle.

> Or to go further, the characters are aware of your presence and will go off script based on your actions. Seems almost within reach.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28002889
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-30 20:51:00+00:00
I agree the original setup didn’t allow for much else in the way of references, I just wanted to shoehorn in a perhaps more apropos time travel movie reference.

If you like Primer you might like this Australian time travel movie also, but I don’t think it references 88 MPH either. It’s a kind of Eternal Sunshine vibe and also involves weird tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinite_Man_(film)
by strange_quark | 2025-07-30 20:51:16+00:00
What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.