MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbastos | 2025-07-16 14:27:13+00:00
Been doing this kind of work since the 90s, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s never been a shortage of hot takes on what makes a “real” engineer.

I was self-taught for my first decade, then got my CS degree while working already as a full-time dev. I’ve seen both sides of the “self-taught vs. formal education” debate. I’ve also lived through the IDE vs. non-IDE wars, the Vim vs. Emacs battles, and was a Linux dev for a decade when everyone else was using Macs and switched sides 5 years ago then everyone went Linux.

Here’s the truth as I’ve seen it: opinions in this field come and go. They’re often rooted in personal insecurity or in “this worked for me so it’s the only right way” thinking.

So here’s mine: no one went back to using encyclopedias after Google showed up. I’m not printing MapQuest directions when GPS exists. Very few of us are still writing assembly, those who are usually do it for niche reasons or street cred.

I remember getting pushback in 2014 for building backend systems in node with JavaScript. Now look where we are.

At the end of the day, whether you’re using LLM tools or not, the only thing that matters is this: can you execute? That’s it. That’s the measure. Everything else is just noise.

I’ve shipped plenty of production apps with help from models, long before tools like Cursor or Lovable were even around 2 years ago. I’m excited for what juniors will create using these tools with intent and curiosity. That’s how they will learn. That’s how they will grow.
Show HN: GitHub for Politicians
by lewis232 | 2025-07-16 14:28:15+00:00
Hi, I am an intern working for a town council election campaign.

Our democracy thrives on robust civic engagement, yet too often, public discourse becomes mired in ideological battles rather than focusing on solutions that truly benefit the community. Our candidate’s core message is that local issues must be approached non-partisanly: we need to put people over politics.

This approach aligns with the very essence of active citizenry. As civic leader Baratunde Thurston compellingly argues, to ‘citizen’ means to:

- Participate: Show up for each other and publicly participate in ways that include and go beyond voting.

- Invest in Relationships: Deepen relationships with ourselves, our community, and our planet and experience how we are all interconnected.

- Understand Power: Be fluent in power, and the various ways we can use it for our collective benefit.

- Value the Collective: Work towards outcomes that benefit the many – not just the few.

Inspired by the collaborative spirit of open-source development, and drawing on my background as a developer, we believe platforms like GitHub can be powerful tools for fostering this kind of inclusive civic engagement. The open-source model has proven remarkably effective in building communities and ensuring transparency, and we are exploring how to apply these principles to local governance.

To kickstart this initiative, we are developing a wiki and a discussion forum within this framework. Our vision is for this platform to serve as a central, accessible repository where all policy-related discussions, ideas, and proposals can be shared and developed collaboratively.

Share your thoughts!
by hermannj314 | 2025-07-16 14:28:32+00:00
People will have more kids when the population of the planet is closer to 1 billion people than 10 billion, it is a problem that mostly self-corrects without intervention from what I can tell.

To answer the headline question: find a way to make other planets inhabitable and the human population will grow to fill the new spaceships, but for now this one is too crowded.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-07-16 14:28:54+00:00
I don't think that is the relevant point. Smalltalk doesn't have visibility either.

The difference is that in smalltalk everything is a message. Operators are messages to an object. Even things we commonly assume to be control structures in other languages like if or while (or rather ifTrue, whileTrue) are messages. Python is a lot less "pure" but so are all commonly used OO languages.
by lxgr | 2025-07-16 14:29:00+00:00
> DoH hosts can resolve to multiple IPs (and even different IPs for different clients)?

Yes, but not from a different organization. That was GPs point with

> So if you want to use DNS over HTTPS on Android, it is not possible to provide a fallback.

A cross-organizational fallback is not possible with DoH in many clients, but it is with plain old DNS.

> It's worth noting that DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) traffic remained relatively stable as most DoH users use the domain cloudflare-dns.com

Yes, but that has nothing to do with failovers to an infrastructurally/operationally separate secondary server.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-07-16 14:29:05+00:00
You have personified EA, but it isn't a person. Some EA people are into long-termism, but it is an error to pretend EA is a monolith that speaks with one voice.

I think the core idea is simply: since resources for helping the poor/sick is not unlimited, we should try to allocate those resources in the most effective way. Before EA charity evaluation came along, the only metric for most people was simply looking at the charity overhead via Charity Navigator. But that isn't a great metric. A charity with only a 1% overhead with a mission to make balloon animals for children dying in a famine will score well on Charity Navigator but does nothing to help the problem.

To be honest I haven't looked deeply into long-termism, but from what I've heard (eg, hearing Will MacAskill on a few podcasts) it seems to ignore a few things. Just like a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, long-termers have no good way to estimate the likelihood of future events, and that discounting needs to increase greatly the further out one looks. At best many of these estimates are like the Drake Equation -- better than nothing, but with multiple orders of magnitude error bars.

There are other second-order reasons which don't seem to factor in, or at least haven't come across in the few hours of listening to long-termers talk about the issue. One is that by working to make a better world now, it effects the trajectory of future events much more directly than the low-probability guesswork they think my have an impact in the distant future.
by commandlinefan | 2025-07-16 14:29:19+00:00
I love seeing efficient use of computing resources. As long as I've been coding, it's been sort of a mantra that "programmer time is more important than execution time" - leading to very inefficient implementations that waste not just processor time but user's time. I keep hoping that with the ongoing migration to "the cloud" that identifies the relationship between efficiency and real cost, there'll be a resurgence in proper optimization.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-16 14:29:26+00:00
> Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI’s Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews.

> “I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”

/me releases a deep, heaving sigh
by simondotau | 2025-07-16 14:29:27+00:00
> Verdana gives unprofessional vibes because a pro wouldn’t use it.

Exactly my point. The name "Google" gives unprofessional vibes because a brand identity pro would never approve that name. And because of those unprofessional vibes, nobody ever took Google seriously.

In reality, font choice is a very surface level analysis. Ever since quality fonts became commoditised, it stopped being a significant signal of professionalism. A top designer could put Comic Sans next to Trajan and make it look like a million bucks; a bad designer could typeset in Gotham and still look like a high school student project.

"Unprofessional font" is a dead meme.
by gavinray | 2025-07-16 14:29:48+00:00
> The ethics and long-term risks here seem huge.

Do they?

If we have the ability to screen embryos to determine which ones are likely to have the least health problems, and to live as fulfilling and successful a life of possible, do we not then have a moral imperative to do this?

Supposing it were free: to choose NOT to do it, would be to say, "I don't care if I bring avoidable pain and suffering into the world."
by HEmanZ | 2025-07-16 14:29:51+00:00
I feel pretty bad for you reading your comments, it sounds like you had a very bad educational experience that caused much more confusion than it should have.

It sounds to me like you may be neurodivergent in some way that made these two parallel aspects of literacy, literature and grammar, hard to disentangle during your education. It sounds like a failure of the education system to adequately guide you or take your particular ways of thinking into account, not a problem with the sort of underlying philosophy of what books we read in school.
by djray | 2025-07-16 14:29:53+00:00
What you gain in performance, you somewhat sacrifice in flexibility, at least in comparison with OpenEXR.

OpenEXR was designed for modularity, allowing efficient access to individual layers or channels. This is crucial in VFX workflows where only specific passes (like normals or diffuse) might be needed at any one time. This access is possible because EXR stores channels separately and supports tiled or scanline-based access.

The custom compression method Aras proposes - using meshoptimizer on 16K pixel chunks, followed by zstd as a second compressor step - achieves significantly faster decompression and better compression speeds than EXR ZIP, HTJ2K, or JPEG-XL lossless. However, it trades off random access and requires decompressing the entire image at once, which increases memory usage. Individual frames for a VFX production can be multiple gigabytes (i.e. dozens of 32-bit layers at 4K resolution).

The author's proposal is still compelling, and I wonder if a variant could find its way into some sort of archival format.
by ForHackernews | 2025-07-16 14:30:29+00:00
Apparently they've offered it as a feature in RDS Postgres for a couple years now https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/10/pgactive-...

But only last month did they officially release it as open source to the community https://aws-news.com/article/2025-06-09-announcing-open-sour...
by tasty_freeze | 2025-07-16 14:31:12+00:00
They claim isn't that there will be trillions of people alive at the same time; they are integrating over the course of tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

Although we are at a peak population of a bit over 8B people at the moment, it is estimated that more than 100B people we would classify as humans have ever lived. The population long ago was much smaller than 1B, but thousands of generations have lived and died.
by orwin | 2025-07-16 14:31:58+00:00
I am so sorry to be this guy, but did she tried CBT with a trained professionnal? You should allow her to vet the therapists (some are bad, other are worse, but good ones definitely exist).

I'm not in the "you should seek help" camp, at all, but for eating disorders in particular, randomized trials show that CBT is extremely effective, on the short and long term.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-16 14:32:00+00:00
Allowing it to go through until next term is fundamentally permitting it. (This is the entire point of injunctions; to prevent irreparable harm while the case is argued.) Many of these folks, once fired, are never coming back. Mission accomplished, even if SCOTUS says "ok we've finally decided that'd be wrong" sometime next year.

> Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is.

The government is not a company. It has three coequal branches. The President is often not legally entitled to fire employees, let alone shutter entire agencies whose existence and function is mandated by law.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48432

"In the 1970s, however, President Richard Nixon asserted the authority to act on his own to withhold funds or curtail programs he opposed. This assertion was challenged in the courts in a number of suits to compel the release of impounded funds or require the Administration to carry out statutory duties that would result in the expenditure of funds. Congress ultimately responded by enacting impoundment control legislation as Title X of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974."
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-07-16 14:32:36+00:00
> deprive society of greater prosperity for the benefit of a small minority.

This already exactly the case. AI won't bring jackshit to anyone except those who're already sitting on too much wealth than any human should deserve.

At best, AI will slightly increase average global misery by virtue of producing too much garbage that pollutes the digital landscape.

The industrial revolution didn't bring prosperity to anyone except the capital owners, who forced their employees (physical force) to work many long hours, in gruesome environment, for pathetic wages.

When the Society's Elites promise something, the common man must be wary, those elites didn't reach their spots by being kind.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-16 14:32:38+00:00
> you've basically got Apple to blame

Yeah, that's the thing that really irks me. WebGPU could have been just a light wrapper over Vulkan like WebGL is (or was, it's complicated now) for OpenGL. But apple has been on a dumb war with Khronos for the last decade which has made everything more difficult.

So now we have n+1 low level standards for GPU programming not because we needed them, but because 1 major player is obstinate.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-16 14:34:06+00:00
The actual posts totally undermine your point:

My general sense is that for research-level mathematical tasks at least, current models fluctuate between "genuinely useful with only broad guidance from user" and "only useful after substantial detailed user guidance", with the most powerful models having a greater proportion of answers in the former category. They seem to work particularly well for questions that are so standard that their answers can basically be found in existing sources such as Wikipedia or StackOverflow; but as one moves into increasingly obscure types of questions, the success rate tapers off (though in a somewhat gradual fashion), and the more user guidance (or higher compute resources) one needs to get the LLM output to a usable form. (2/2)
by m-schuetz | 2025-07-16 14:34:56+00:00
It won't. It's barely simpler but lacks a lot of functionality. Some stuff that became optional in Vulkan (render passes) are still mandatory on WebGPU, and bind groups are static and thus cumbersome. It also adds additional limitations and cruft, like you can't easily transfer from host to a buffer subregion and need staging buffers.

I'll use it for web since there is no alternative, but for desktop I'll stick with an OpenGL+CUDA interop framework until a sane, modern graphics API shows up. I.e., a graphics API that gets rid of render pases, static pipelines, mandatory explizit syncing, bindings and descriptor sets (simply use buffers and pointers), and all the other nonsense.

If allocating and populating a buffer takes more effort than a simple cuMemAlloc and cuMemcpy, and calling a shader with arguments takes more than simply passing the shader pointers to the data, then I'm out.
by ragona | 2025-07-16 14:35:20+00:00
(Note; I also work for OpenAI Security — though I’ve not worked on our bounty program for some time. These just my thoughts and experiences.)

I believe the author was referring to the standard BugCrowd terms, which as far as I know are themselves fairly common across the various platforms. In my experience we are happy for researchers to publish their work within the normal guidelines you’d expect from a bounty program — it’s something I’ve worked with researchers on without incident.
by switknee | 2025-07-16 14:35:47+00:00
I suspect it is just political pettiness. None of their complaints about brave seem to hold water. Why should Lobsters be bothered by brave ads? That only happens if the user tells their user agent (brave browser) to show extra ads, in order to earn a worthless cryptocurrency. If the user wants to see extra ads or otherwise modify their browsing experience it isn't a concern of the website. Lobsters also doesn't seem to value the brave token, so why is it a problem if they can't access less than $100 in brave token?

Brave leaking DNS to cloudflare in tor browsing, compared to google Chrome leaking every request to google at all times? Why not block Chrome?
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-16 14:35:48+00:00
One of the consequenes of our population growth, combined with our willingness to allow NIMBYs to dictate our housing policy, is that more and more new houses are built in areas that regularly experience major natural disasters. And if that isn't enough of a tragedy, these plots of land are treated as valuable when they really aren't, leading to people sinking big chunks of their net worth into what is objectively a liability.
by Loughla | 2025-07-16 14:36:16+00:00
I think the biggest problem for those that make it is being surrounded by people who just say yes, and not realizing when that transition happens. If you come from middle- to upper-middle-class and become 1% of the 1%, this switch has to be subtle, I would imagine.

When you're worth billions, it's easy to see how correct you were about business (or just assume you were correct, whether it was luck, inheritance, or whatever). And weirdly, the people in your life tend to agree with you about everything else outside of business (because they want access to that billionaire lifestyle, or are also so disconnected from average life that they naturally share your views already). You never hear a dissenting opinion, unless it's from some weirdo on the internet who is plainly just jealous of your wealth.

Jesters need to be a thing again. Somebody that follows around the wealthy and powerful and just absolutely blasts their bullshit every chance they get. Someone to say 'no' when all of the hangers-on say nothing but 'yes'.
by filoeleven | 2025-07-16 14:36:19+00:00
Destin from Smarter Every Day put up a video of a talk he gave at NASA about this program, focusing on all the problems that nobody's talking about. It's a great watch and a good example of how to say the hard things to the people who need to hear them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
by dao- | 2025-07-16 14:36:38+00:00
> People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.

> The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.

It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
by judahmeek | 2025-07-16 14:36:53+00:00
> I didn't read it as racist Trumpist white nationalist rhetoric but as specific commentary about race-based preferences in admissions combined with immigration.

When racist Trumpist white nationalist rhetoric gets distilled into desired policy, what else is there besides changes to race-based preferences in admissions & changes to immigration?

It seems like Andreessen supports Trump's entire racial platform, just not the rhetoric that Trump's MAGA base uses.
by al_borland | 2025-07-16 14:36:54+00:00
This has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with not having the population collapse, because we've become so focused on pleasure that we forgot why there is a biological advantage to it being pleasureful... to do it more and reproduce more. But modern technology has eliminated that pesky side effect of children.

The pleasure can and does still exist. It's not like it gets removed when sex is ends in a pregnancy. It doesn't have to be some mechanical act, the way you seem to be framing it.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-16 14:37:26+00:00
> Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.

But that's a very key point of advantage in by-design open-ness and non-commercialisation.

It's taken 30(-odd?) years and the coining of the word enshittification, but the advantages of this ideology is now having the last of the clay and sand brushed off it, baring its beauty to a growing audience.

And Linux has, in fact, gotten steadily better over that time too, but it's been a slow consistent grind, so it doesn't appear as grand as a sudden red-curtain-unveiling-worthy improvement, but it is, in fact, that grand.

(What Valve / Steam / Proton has done may be the closest to a rapid increase of usability / marketability, but even that has been relatively subtly under the radar unless you're paying attention).
by dolder14 | 2025-07-16 14:37:35+00:00
I’ve brought a fun little side project to life, bringing a little nostalgia and fun to blank screens. I built Split-Flap Board for Apple TV (specifically for tvOS, but will expand to others if there is interest). Greet your guests with a custom click-clack welcome message or brighten up dark office monitors, create menu boards or other dynamic signage. It’s free, no expensive subscriptions, works offline, and you control everything right from your remote or phone. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think. Open to suggestions/ideas.
by stirfish | 2025-07-16 14:38:41+00:00
I've been vibe coding boids implementations because my toddler likes to look at them. Here's one where the attributes of the boids (alignment, etc) are hooked up to frequency generators like a sequencer: https://neuroky.me/boidsine.html?boidCount=1700&hue=sine3&se...

I can move them to GitHub or something, but they are currently hosted in my pantry. Please be gentle :)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-16 14:39:26+00:00
It depends on what you mean by "creative" - they can recombine fragments of training data (i.e. apply generative rules) in any order - generate the deductive closure of the training set, but that is it.

Without moving beyond LLMs to a more brain-like cognitive architecture, all you can do is squeeze the juice out of the training data, by using RL/etc to bias the generative process (according to reasoning data, good taste or whatever), but you can't move beyond the training data to be truly creative.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-16 14:39:37+00:00
The reality is, civilians cannot change a country's domestic foreign policy - especially in a country like Russia.

Revolutions don't work without alignment from power centers like the police, military, judiciary, and a subset of legislators.

Hosni Mubarak wasn't overthrown because of protesters in Tahrir Square - he was overthrown because General Sisi decided to ignore shoot-on-sight orders.

There's no reason for Ukraine media to create a literal attack surface when most Russians already have a decent idea of what is happening in Ukraine (and vice versa) - most Russians and Ukrainians have blood relatives on both sides of the border.