MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Molab, a cloud-hosted Marimo notebook workspace
by akshayka | 2025-07-18 18:40:30+00:00
We launched marimo [1], an open-source reactive Python notebook, last year on HackerNews. Today, the most popular recent feature request in Google Colab’s issue tracker asks for marimo support in Colab [2].

Rather than try to convince Google to replace their notebook with marimo, we decided to just build our own cloud-hosted notebook service instead. We're calling this molab (mo for marimo), and we're launching it today.

You can try it at https://molab.marimo.io

Some features:

- Persistent storage

- Link sharing (notebooks are public but undiscoverable, like secret GitHub Gists)

- Download notebooks to your machine, reuse them as Python scripts or apps

- Upload local notebooks to the cloud from our CLI (coming soon)

- Real-time collaboration (coming soon)

- Configure computational resources to obtain more CPU or GPU (coming soon)

marimo is a modern notebook for modern data workflows; we also built molab on a modern tech stack:

- Notebook dependencies are managed by uv, enabling lighting-fast package installation (thanks to uv’s cache and more generally its performant implementation). uv makes it easy to run molab notebooks locally, too: uvx marimo edit <notebook-url> brings the notebook down to your machine.

- Persistent storage is powered by R2, Cloudflare’s zero-egress object store.

- We use Pydantic logfire to monitor our deployment.

- While our implementation is agnostic to the compute backend (stay tuned!), we’re currently running on Modal for fast startups (not to mention a slick developer experience). Modal sandboxes make it easy for us define containers at runtime, containing notebook code and their dependencies. (Shout out to Eric Zhang from Modal for helping us get started.)

molab is free to use, as long as usage is reasonable. Our goal is to make is as easy as possible for our community to use marimo notebooks.

Finally, learn more at our announcement blog: https://marimo.io/blog/announcing-molab

If this interests you, please give molab a shot and please share feedback — here or on Discord (https://marimo.io/discord).

P.S. This is not our commercial product, this is really just for our community.

[1] https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo [2] https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues?q=is%3Aissu...
by Ancapistani | 2025-07-18 18:40:49+00:00
Since they released, I've owned two pairs of AirPods, three pairs of AirPod Pros, and now I use AirPods Max.

The original AirPods were great. My first pair lasted years and I replaced them due to the batteries no longer lasting a full day for conference calls and such. I passed them down to my kids and replaced them.

The AirPods Pro had some teething issues but are clearly the better product IMO. My first pair had the "crackling" issue, so Apple replaced them under warranty. My second pair was great and lasted years. I left them home when I was on a work trip, so I picked up another set and passed the older ones down again. The third set developed the "crackling" issue after about six months.

Apple replaced them no questions asked, but managed to sell me on the Max while I was at the store. I was hesitant, but yielded after they revealed that they had a pair that had been returned open but apparently unused. They seemed perfect to me, and they offered to replace the ear pads "just in case".

At $350 for the returned pair, it still felt like too much to spend on headphones - but I was willing to give it a shot. I asked if I could hang out in the store for a while and try them. No problem. About fifteen minutes later another employee approached me that seemed more "manager-like" and told me that since I had brought in a pair of AirPods Pro for warranty replacement, she could issue me a $50 credit as a loyalty perk if I wanted to buy the Max.

All told, between the open-box discount, the offered credit, and a few random bucks I had in Apple Cash (which I never use and am not even sure how they got there), I walked out with them for ~$250.

Both my daughters now have AirPod Pros and I have the Max. My wife is the only holdout in the family, with her Galaxy Buds.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-18 18:42:17+00:00
Well, in the last six months there has been an attempt to push a "high agency = high-D" meme which is just not true. Elon Musk is effective in the ways he is effective despite being an asshole, not because he's an asshole. I've known a few Nobel Prize and McArthur Genius winners and worked closely with two: one was a real asshole, the others were average to highly agreeable people.

There is a "low agency" problem with the Democratic Party and the left which turns in a few ways.

Excessive valorization of marginalization makes you low agency. Being afraid to say anything that offends donors or groups make you low agency. The interpretation that Kamala Harris lost the last election because of inflation is a low agency interpretation (even if it is true) because there's nothing she could do about it and it doesn't give any guidance for how the next candidate could change or even indication that the other candidate needs to change. Interpretations that blame the "they/them" ad and the context around it are higher agency because they can do something about it.

It's not directly related to high-D or low-D, I think Clinton and Cuomo are very high-D, Harris was not particularly high-D, Biden hanging on despite promising to be a "transitional figure" was high-D.

As for Pinker I am calling him out for remarks he made about being in a clique that had dealings with Epstein. I'm aware of no evidence that Pinker did anything criminal. But he showed bad judgement in being there and particularly bad judgement in statements he made about it where he failed to "cover his ass" and instead tried to present himself as "interesting" or "cool" or "incisive" or something. Wisdom in that case would have been to do what his lawyer would have told him to do which is to say "no comment" -- covering your ass doesn't make you a great human being, but it's better than the alternative of opening your mouth and making yourself look bad.

It's one thing if you're a rando, it's another thing if you want people to think you're an expert in human nature.

Whatever Pinker's D score is, he's embedded in a high-D culture and in a high-D culture you tend to be tolerant of high-D people. One of the codes of high status is deference; you are an expert on your domain, somebody else is an expert on their domain. You don't criticize high status people: when people like Musk and Trump do this, people are shocked.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 18:42:34+00:00
The PDF spec is well designed to be both very expandable and easily readable.

It's absolutely horrible to try and edit.

That's because the structure of a PDF is essentially a bunch of media "streams". It's very easy to say "render a jpeg at this location on the page" but that's about it. It doesn't store, for example, the fact that you might need to wrap words around a page. Instead, it's "Here's a box with text in it".

The only thing that really could make PDF rendering hard is adobe put a whole bunch of garbage into the spec. For example, the full spec had the ability to run javascript and flash at one point (not sure if it does anymore).
by gessha | 2025-07-18 18:43:08+00:00
Smells like fanboy in here. The article mentions nothing about construction operations which makes sense since that is best contracted out. I can’t imagine Musk tolerating the hiring and layoffs of construction crews. The numbers in the article are based on SpaceX’s actual manufacturing facilities and operations. The highest injury rate seems to be in booster recovery operations with other facilities bringing the average down.

> OSHA uses a standardized safety metric called Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) to measure a company’s safety record and compare it to industry peers, like Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance.

> Of the 14 OSHA inspections at SpaceX facilities over the past four years, six involved accidents and injuries at Starbase. That includes a partial finger amputation in 2021 and a crane collapse in June 2025. The latter inspection is still ongoing. Investigations by other news outlets including Reuters have uncovered hundreds of previously unreported worker injuries, including crushed limbs and one fatality.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-18 18:43:21+00:00
About 2 weeks ago OpenAI won a $200 million contract with the Defense Department. That's after partnering with Anduril for quote "national security missions." And all that is after the military enlisted OpenAI's "Chief Product Officer" and sent him straight to Lt. Colonel to work in a collaborative role directly with the military.

And that's the sort of stuff that's not classified. There's, with 100% certainty, plenty that is.
by beyang | 2025-07-18 18:43:52+00:00
If you like Claude Code but either (1) prefer an agent that doesn't ask for review on each file edit or (2) miss the IDE for things like reviewing diffs, I'd humbly submit you try out Amp: https://ampcode.com. It has both a CLI and VS Code extension, and we built it from the ground up for agentic coding, so no asking for permission on each edit, a first-class editor extension (personally I spend more and more time reviewing diffs and VS Code's diff view is great), and it employs subagents for codebase search and extended thinking (using a combo of Sonnet and o3) to maximize use of the context window.
by nucleardog | 2025-07-18 18:44:20+00:00
The lenses are more about what results will be returned by Kagi's search. They were originally (and still are) a search feature you can use in regular searches.

For example, one of their default lenses is "Academic". It searches research institutions/scientific journals/universities/etc. So as an example, if I search "ulcer risk of ibuprofen":

The "Academic" lens returns the NIH with "Research summaries -- Preventing peptic ulcers"[0] and ScienceDirect with a paper on "The gastrointestinal effects of nonselective NSAIDs and COX-2-selective inhibitors"[1].

Searching without the lens, I get Healthline's "Ibuprofen and Ulcers: Why They Happen and How To Avoid Them"[2] and Medical News Today's "Ibuprofen ulcers: Effects, symptoms, causes, and more"[3].

You can apply these lenses to searches the AI assistant performs separately from the prompts/context/etc. So, for instance, I can set up an "assistant" based on Claude called "Research" restricted to the "Academic" lens. When I ask that assistant questions and it performs a web search, only results from the academic lens (research institutes, universities, etc) will be returned to the AI.

You could do similar with, e.g., setting up an assistant for "Coding with Python" and creating a lens that's restricted to the Python documentation, one for "Local Knowledge" that's restricted to sites from your region, "Recent Developments" that only considers sites published in a certain timeframe, "eBooks" that only returns epub results, etc.

Your prompt/etc is configured separately as part of the "assistant" you're using. So you could have a research assistant with a prompt that asks it to approach the problem step-by-step and evaluate the veracity of the sources, a coding assistant whose prompt includes the language/framework, etc. But there's nothing stopping you hooking your "research assistant" up to your "Coding with Python" lens.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310269/ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490... [2] https://www.healthline.com/health/ibuprofen-ulcer [3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ibuprofen-ulcers
by jfultz | 2025-07-18 18:44:24+00:00
An alternative to securing or recreating the entire technology stack top to bottom would be to own one critical piece of the stack. If European interests owned a vital slice of the technology stack that was difficult to recreate and too cheap/convenient to not be used by international government/business/consumer interests, that could be a powerful deterrent. I.e., it sets up a "mutual assured destruction"-style defense.
by AkshatM | 2025-07-18 18:44:28+00:00
That's not an apples to apples comparison. You don't know if the foreign workers were senior-level employees, for example, or whether there were specialized requirements they might have been hired against that entry-level grads won't qualify for.

I agree there should be more entry-level roles. But this is not an indictment of the system. You should ask what percentage of those foreign workers were hired into entry-level roles.
by dijit | 2025-07-18 18:44:44+00:00
because the American companies pay better and even if people managed to come up with something very innovative, they would then be purchased by a US mega corporation anyway.

All you will end up with is more or less rich, and frankly the risk is that you go broke. So, why not take the money and work at a US tech company? They’ll get the tech anyway if its good and you get more stability this way.
by Delk | 2025-07-18 18:45:12+00:00
The post is from 2018, so dxvk either wasn't there or was too immature.

From today's point of view, the post may not be that interesting in the practical sense of running the game. But some might find the obscure feature of custom clip planes interesting, or how a change or a detail in API specs lead to a regression.

If course today you'd want to use dxvk.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-18 18:45:14+00:00
The traditional HN way is to make up some "It's Just That They Hate Us"[0] teenage conspiracy. The reality is this: amphetamine was widely used medically for decades by the time the Controlled Substances Act was passed. When these acts are passed, governments are usually under pressure to not remove access to things that people commonly use. Therefore, it was scheduled in a category that recognized medical use. This allowed the subsequent development of associated clinical trials and so on. It is much harder to work with Schedule I drugs than Schedule II drugs. So an accident of historical timing is what caused the difference.

0: This game is really tiresome. It's "capitalism". "They just don't want to lose power". "There's no money in it". Thought-terminating cliches. LLM-grade.
by motorest | 2025-07-18 18:45:45+00:00
> (...) in 2024 a continuation of Biden's term, represented by a poor politician hand-picked by the party and Trump, the one-term loser.

Pause. Even though I'm not a US citizen, it is very hard to try to spin Biden's term as anything other than one of US's best governments in decades.

Comparing Biden's term to any of Trump's terms, specially the utter pyrrhic trainwreck that is the current term, and proclaim they are comparable is simply something not rooted in reality.

Try to be serious.
by Terr_ | 2025-07-18 18:46:48+00:00
That's like asking: "Do people still take the elementary-school principal seriously when he keeps joking about having sex with the children?"

First, the situation itself is always serious, because because nobody in that kind of position should ever be "joking" about such a thing.

Second, this guy's not joking. A threat does not become a joke simply because it is weak/unlikely or delivered while chuckling.
by proberts | 2025-07-18 18:47:29+00:00
That the I-140 petition is an EB1A petition (which can also be filed by an individual) doesn't change the analysis. If the employer-filed I-140 petition was approved more than 180 days ago even if the I-485 has been pending for less than 180 days, while an employer can withdraw the I-140 petition (thus requiring the employee to get a new approved I-140 petition to get a green card), the individual still would keep his or her priority date.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 18:47:36+00:00
All that matters is what the supreme court believes that the constitution and laws mean.

It's true that if you applied prior judicial standards that its crystal clear the constitution and bill of rights extend beyond just protecting citizens. Same for the law. However, with a lot of the recent rulings it seems that now "might makes right" and "if the president does it, it's not illegal".

Both the judicial and legislative bodies have ceded nearly all their power to the executive. We're in for a bumpy ride.
by Alupis | 2025-07-18 18:47:42+00:00
Our friends in the EU have a long history of well-intentioned but misguided policy and regulations, which has led to stunted growth in their tech sector.

Maybe some think that is a good thing - and perhaps it may be - but I feel it's more likely any regulation regarding AI at this point in time is premature, doomed for failure and unintended consequences.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-18 18:48:14+00:00
Somewhat tangential, but HathiTrust was born from what I would consider the "golden age" of technical work coming out of libraries (2002-2010). One of the unintended consequences of the dotcom crash was that compensation falling meant that there were a lot of talented software people working on what interested them rather than what simply paid the most (since the gap was much smaller).

As a result research libraries were well staffed with very technical people all genuinely interested in making software that made the world a better place. MIT's DSpace, LibraryThing, Open ILSs like Evergreen/Koha, and a huge range of quirky/innovative smaller projects that no longer exist all came out of this period.

It ended around 2010 since the GFC fallout started to hit library budgets while tech suddenly started getting really hot. Even if you loved libraries, most library devs where facing pay cuts to stay in libraries versus massive raises and other quality of life improvements for going into tech. Plus startups and tech companies in general at the time felt more inspired.
by NewUser76312 | 2025-07-18 18:48:19+00:00
I'm still not sold on these "AIs in your codebase" tools. Same for 'vibe coding'.

I use AI like a scalpel - I go in and figure out exactly what I want, use my prompting experience to get a few functions, or up to 1 script at a time, read it, put it in, and stress-test it immediately.

As a result, I am extremely happy with my AI-generated code about 95% of the time. However, this requires that I still understand my codebase, requirements, failure modes, etc.

My philosophy is that software dev creation speed is certainly important, but durability is even more critical. Currently, it seems like going too deep with these AI tools is sacrificing the former for the latter. If all you're doing is POCs all day I could see it (even then, don't let them get too big...) but it's just not for me, at least not yet.
by marcellus23 | 2025-07-18 18:49:42+00:00
> "did some non-deterministic chat-bot write this?", "are these logs even internally consistent?", "Why does this log mention code that doesn't exist?".

This is the same complaint about all AI-generated code, the simple answer to which is, review the code yourself before committing. Or if it's a real project, it'll get reviewed by someone else anyway, same as any other code that could have a mistake in it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-18 18:50:03+00:00
> a common excuse: Blame some hidden susceptibility, not the drug

It's the interaction between that person and the drug.

I have a crustacean allergy. That doesn't mean crustaceans are bad, or other people shouldn't eat shrimp. It just means it's a bad mix for me.

One of the benefits of administering psychedelics in a clinical setting is that telepathic nonsense is more likely to be noticed early and corrected for, whether by reducing dosage or suspending treatement. (And treating it as medicine allows us to study those people who react negatively to it, further reducing harm.)
by ineedaj0b | 2025-07-18 18:50:39+00:00
i worked construction for a summer (roofing) and a lot of guys were drunk or on something fun.

i imagine elon is pushing them to build much faster than normal and they'll try.. but you also can't be on anything working a fast schedule. i think zyns would be the only thing safe, adderall would leave you too dehydrated, painkillers sure but you also get clumsier ime, even advil had me feeling off.

construction is hard! i have no idea how the Japanese have such efficiency. they work fast and make it look relaxed.
by Ancapistani | 2025-07-18 18:51:07+00:00
Why would it be?

I live in a red state in the South. I'd say about 2/3 of the women I know well enough to be confident of their politics to that degree of detail would describe themselves as both feminists and anti-abortion/pro-life.

If you want to put a name to it, they're basically second-wave feminists with a few third-wave beliefs tacked on.

The real lesson here is that politics are nuanced, and the US party dichotomy doesn't come close to covering it.

I consider myself an AnCap (shocking given my username, I know), but grew up here surrounded by Republicans. I fit in well enough overall because this is where I developed my "social mask" in the first place. I lived in a community with nearly directly opposite politics (Charlottesville, VA) for a few years and found that I fit in pretty well with that crowd as well.

I share enough with both parties that I can have conversations on things that I agree with them on and connect to the point that they assume that I'm "one of them". Invariably, once conversation turns to other topics I'm accused of being a member of the other party. It's to the point that it amuses me when it happens, and I frankly enjoy being in a place where I can connect with most everyone and serve as a sort of translator: I've spent enough time "in enemy territory" from their perspectives that I can explain the other side's position fairly and with empathy while explicitly not holding that position. It makes for stimulating conversation with little risk of offense.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 18:51:20+00:00
"Due process" is the most important right for everyone. It's what determines if someone should even be deported in the first place.

Without it, the executive gets to just say "that person shouldn't be here" and they can send them wherever the whims of the government are in the day.

Due process is how someone says "Hey government, you've made a mistake".

It isn't just due process. It's "I'm a US citizen, you can't legally deport me" Due process is what enables making that argument at all.
by chha | 2025-07-18 18:51:26+00:00
It doesn't say audited environments as such, but you are required to use secure environments that you control as a basis. What "secure" means can always be discussed, but in general it depends on what data you process and what you do with it; if it is a large volume/big population/article 9-data auditable environments should be expected - though not publicly auditable. Although that would be nice...

Fully agree on what you are saying, and my popcorn is ready for August when the penalties part of the AI Act comes into force. There is a grace period for two years for certain systems already on the market, but any new model introduced after August this year has to be compliant. AI Act+GDPR will be a great show to watch...
by UncleOxidant | 2025-07-18 18:51:28+00:00
Agreed. Consider that we're in a big tech bubble right now (AI) and have been for at least a couple years. And yet tech layoffs have been way up, and hiring way down. Part of that that could be attributable to 174, but there are other issues that contribute more. One would be that there are vanishingly few people with actual experience in this narrow part of AI (LLMs) - I know people working in AI that have been laid off in the last couple of years because they were in the wrong area of AI (vision & CNNs). Secondly, it turns out that not that many people are needed to work on this stuff (mostly concentrated in large companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft & Amazon). And thirdly, folks in the C suite became convinced that AI is going to replace software engineers so they've quite hiring them.