MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bko | 2025-07-06 15:54:34+00:00
> Taxis in the US are one of the most regulated services around, and they were still utterly atrocious.

Maybe the fact that they were the most regulated services around was exactly why they were atrocious. Regulation often erects barriers to competition. It's impossible for a regulatory body to spell out every way in which a company can be exploitive and disallow it. The only thing that prevents bad behavior is meaningful competition.

It was this regulatory body that limited the number of cabs that could be on the road at any given time and set "fair" meter pricing. What resulted was that if you lived in a poor isolated neighborhood, there would be no cabs willing to take you there or driving around to pick you up. Uber solved this pretty much overnight.
by Ukv | 2025-07-06 15:54:42+00:00
To my understanding the idea is that if a company licenses some 3rd-party component for their game, the component would either need to be severable from the game while still leaving it reasonably playable, or the license would need to permit people who have purchased the game to use that component. This is going foward, not applying retroactively to existing games.

I think that's still fairly favorable to game publishers compared to most other purchased goods. If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games).

Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-06 15:55:09+00:00
Yes it may be the case that the achilles heel of Eshell is that it tries to be too bash-like. Just making it clear that this is an "elisp thing that interacts with both emacs and your system" and call it "dialog" or "interactive scripter" or something and dispense with following normal shell conventions (while still offering tab completion etc) might have been wiser.
by omneity | 2025-07-06 15:56:01+00:00
Hello HN!

I've been developing a lot of LLM-based apps recently, and I got tired of writing the same glue code each time to switch providers, find the base URL again, or other strategies to deal with provider idiosyncracies, so I extracted out that code into a package named BorgLLM.

It's a zero-config Langchain client to 100s of providers & models, it has automatic API key rotation, rate-limit fallback strategies and more concerns you won't have to put in your application code...

One liner to rule them all (you can pick any model or any provider):

llm = create_llm("anthropic:claude-sonnet-4")

And my application code is finally clean, focusing on the domain. It's not a very complex package yet it might be one of the biggest time savers I added to my development workflow.

I hope you'll find it useful. Questions and feedback points are most welcome!
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 15:56:12+00:00
> compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys

This is almost always the case, actually. Regulation and compliance are taxes on the productivity of an organization. And the "shape" of the tax is mostly flat - the burden is sublinear in the size of the organization, so the relative effects on smaller companies are bigger. And smaller companies already have significantly less available resources, and especially less legal resources (no lawyers on retainer), to handle it.

Obviously that doesn't mean that regulation shouldn't be passed, just that you have to write it very, very carefully - think embedded systems rather than web frontend - minimizing complexity and aggressively red-teaming it for loopholes and edge-cases.
by AstroBen | 2025-07-06 15:56:23+00:00
The market supremacy came afterwards, not before. Most people don't want the expensive premium version - they want good enough at a low investment. And that's fine

There's also a segment of the market that wants the FLAC, premium handcrafted experiences at top price. They're not in direct competition and both can co-exist

My initial point was that companies can't just exploit consumers relentlessly because the market won't let them. The good value option can't just box people in and show them only ads. I bet YouTube would love to show you unskippable ads for 75% of the video length. Good luck staying market leader with that

I don't think Google is a good example here. They've been actively trying to fight and failing against SEO and affiliate spam for a decade. No-one else has solved that problem either which is why Google remains at the top. I personally had a hand-crafted content site thrown out of their search results because of them going after spam
by ziknard | 2025-07-06 15:56:24+00:00
Tried everything. The only response is "Error: Failed to execute function: failed to deserialize api response: expected value at line 1 column 1".

Can't see anything about this in Issues. Checked the API key a dozen times.

Need an example, perhaps some setup suggestions, and better coverage of potential errors.

Edit: this may be because I only have a free account at OpenAI. If a paid account is necessary, it would be great to mention that in the ReadMe.

Also, tried it with ollama API, but the code is looking for /chat/completions in the API base, but it looks like ollama wants something like /api/chat. Can't find where in the code this is formatted.

Since you mention smollm2 and local compatibility in the readme, it would be helpful to include something about how to configure for other APIs
by exceptione | 2025-07-06 15:56:37+00:00
> Mass immigration is

... the reason you are able to chat on the internet instead of doing low paid, hard work. But don't discount the upside of immigration. It is a great subject to spread narratives about. "Others" is a matter to which people are very sensitive to. The Irish are absolute trash, as are the Italians. But what we really could do without are the Catholics, they are a direct threat to society.

There is always crime to report. But notice the narratives are never about white collar crime. That might come to close.
by tombert | 2025-07-06 15:56:42+00:00
Yes, but it was initially leading to some incorrect conclusions on my end, about certain things being “slow”.

For example, because I was trying to use fine-grained timers for everything async, I thought the JSON parsing library we were using was a bottleneck, because I saw some numbers like 30ms to parse a simple thing. I wasn’t measuring total throughput, I was measuring individual items for parts of the flow and incorrectly assumed that that applied to everything.

You just have to be a bit more careful than I was with using timers. Either make sure than your timer isn’t going across any kind of yield points, or only use timers in a more “macro” sense (e.g. measure total throughput). Otherwise you risk misleading numbers and bad conclusions.
by toast0 | 2025-07-06 15:57:33+00:00
Most of that era consoles would load level data from the CD, and then play the music as cd-da audio. There was no DRM on the music, perhaps because nobody thought of it, but more likely because there wasn't quite enough computing power to do it. PS2 games could be on CD or DVD and could have had cd quality music as a data file reasonably, but PS1 probably not, and cross platform games likely would use cd audio because it's easy.

The choice for licensors was to have the music in the game and available on the cd or not.

For a modern release, DRM music tracks that only play in the game is an option.

We've also learned that the licenses are (or were) often time limited... The publisher can't make new copies after some time, without getting a new license for the audio. Sometimes that's also related to a different format.
by zbentley | 2025-07-06 15:57:36+00:00
Consider public service software/IT engineering.

Contrary to popular belief, in the US there are state/federal government software jobs.

They don’t pay as well as the private sector, but it’s only a few steps down, not “get used to earning 20% as much”.

Is the bullshit rate in many of those jobs incredibly high? Absolutely. But can a talented generalist from the private sector make huge improvements for real people? You bet. So much of government IT is crippled by dated approaches and over-reliance on contractors (and the lack of knowledge of best practices that comes from very few folks transitioning from the private sector—those few steps down in salary are not a road often travelled).

As a result, someone with talent and familiarity with how much better things can be (and a willingness to push on broken rules/processes) can have a huge impact. You’ll have to do a lot of “here is a prototype nobody asked for built in a way nobody here is currently allowed to build it”-type performing in the first year or two, but at the right government agency folks who do that get to deliver massive benefits to real people every day.

There are enough sub components of government (agencies, sub-agencies, state, municipal) that you can easily find work you agree with. It’s frustrating to apply, but truly: once in the door, talented folks can achieve a huge amount.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 15:57:38+00:00
That is less useful than you might expect due to issues of timing skew and signal reflections from transmission-line impedance mismatches.

SCSI was already contending with the termination problem in the early 90s; low-voltage differential SCSI was in the SCSI-3 standard from 01995, 30 years ago, in order to hit 80 megabytes per second over the kind of multidrop (bus) parallel interface you're talking about. That's twenty thousand times slower than the main system memory interface on the latest amd64 servers.

At the point where you already had to go to low-voltage differential signaling to get reliable communication, your bus is no longer a useful GPIO interface for blinking LEDs.

But if you have a 50¢ 16-line GPIO expander chip like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/kinetic-technolog... somewhere on the SMBus the board is already using for things like temperature monitoring, maybe for some other minor interface function, all that's required is to run its GPIOs to test points and document them. Not as fast as the ISA bus but plenty of power for simple digital interfacing.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-06 15:57:40+00:00
This is not an AI problem, this is a problem caused by extremely large piles of money. In the past two decades we have been concentrating money in the hands of people who did little more than be in the right place at the right time with a good idea and a set of technical skills, and then told them that they were geniuses who could fix human problems with technological solutions. At the same time we made it impossible to invest money safely by making the interest rate almost zero, and then continued to pass more and more tax breaks. What did we expect was going to happen? There are only so many problems that can be solved by technology that we actually need solving, or that create real value or bolster human society. We are spinning wheels just to spin them, and have given the reins to the people with not only the means and the intent to unravel society in all the worst ways, but who are also convinced that they are smarter than everyone else because they figured out how to arbitrage the temporal gap between the emergence of a capability and the realization of the damage it creates.
by CPLX | 2025-07-06 15:59:01+00:00
> The good old days sucked

They didn’t suck. Like many situations that were resource constrained they had unique positive attributes even though you have a strong preference for the alternative strictly speaking.

Sometimes being constrained forces you to have a different and better experience, like when you’re young and broke and have adventures, or there’s a power outage and the city turns into a party, or when you miss the bus and have an interesting walk.

I was and am a musician and massive music fan. I miss the experience of being on a long train trip with only 10 CDs and really deeply connecting to each of them with no distractions. I miss discovering something on a record store clerk’s recommendation. And it’s not fair to say I just miss being younger those were specific experiences and they were pleasant.

I’m not saying I’m going back, or that we all should. I am happy with unlimited access to everything that’s also great. But back then it didn’t suck, it was great in a different way.
by gruturo | 2025-07-06 15:59:42+00:00
> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?

Actually not Netflix as they just offer a monthly subscription and not individual sales, but _YES_ by all means if I "purchase" (not rent!) a book or movie on Amazon (or anyone else), I'd like that, thank you.
by lazystar | 2025-07-06 16:00:05+00:00
as someone who survived on tips for 2 1/2 years while studying comp sci, you're missing one key detail.

tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the same number of hours, the higher skilled driver earns more because they get more tips.

this "work harder => more pay" incentive is pretty unique in the industry; in manual labor jobs where each day has a set limit on the amount of work that can be completed, like grocery merchandising, workers that work harder get paid less than average workers. stock incentives are the closest comparison, but it's too far removed from the individual worker's output when the company's size grows above 100 employees.

the point is, part of the problem is the lack of other incentives that reward the hardest/best skilled workers.
by osy | 2025-07-06 16:00:09+00:00
STM32H7 is just an example. Most (all?) STM32 with has hardware SPI slave support. For example the STM32F030C8T6 is on JLCPCB as a basic part (no per-part cost for assembly) at $0.82 while the RP2040 is $1.11.

While the RP2040 and RP2350 has a much nicer to use SDK and for certain applications like USB it is much easier to set up, the STM32 is much more versatile and is just a much more mature product (don't get me started about the RP2350 having broken pull-downs on GPIO pins).
by igregoryca | 2025-07-06 16:00:18+00:00
> I do think it's likely more passive than active. People at Google aren't deviously plotting to hide buttons from the user.

This is important, thank you for mentioning it: actions have consequences besides those that motivated the action. I don't like when people say "<actor> did <action>, and it leads to this nefarious outcome, therefore look how evil <actor> must be". Yes, there is always a chance that <actor> really is a scheming, cartoonish villain who intended that outcome all along. But how likely is it that <actor> is just naive, or careless, or overly optimistic?

Of course, the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle: familiarity with a hard-to-learn UI as a point of friction that promotes lock-in may not be a goal, but when it manifests, it doesn't hurt the business, so no one does anything about it. Does that mean the designers should be called out for it? If the effect is damaging enough to the collective interest, then maybe yes. But we needn't assume nefarious intentions to do so.

Then again, everyone thinks their own actions are justified within their own value system, and corporate values do tend toward the common denominator (usually involving profit-making). Maybe the world just has way more cartoonish villains than I give it credit for.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-07-06 16:00:34+00:00
You said:

> there is a reason

What's in the garage? There's a car. I wouldn't expect to walk in and find many cars.

Had you said:

> this is a reason

that would convey it was one among potentially many.

Either way my comment wasn't even about you, it was about Reddit, so idk why you got riled up.
by ivape | 2025-07-06 16:00:38+00:00
It created a brand-new concept of private listening, I think. Music listening must have been a communal thing up until then mostly (I'm counting record players in this, so we'd need to go further back before the 20th century to consider what I'm saying). It does follow that the more we allow you to do by yourself, the more you won't do with others. Take eating by yourself for example. I can't imagine that being a common thing before our time. Tech is really putting us into a spaceship. Your little dwelling is just a ship with a terminal, and you can definitely slap on some headphones and put a screen in front of you and basically float through space in your spaceship until the day you die.

We can probably measure the impact this is having culturally specifically in non-western cultures, because their baseline is not as anti-social compared to the west.

I think it's also worth noting that many are not going to read this article and go "hah, they got it totally wrong". They didn't. Mass scale human behavioral change has the been the story for a while now.
by submeta | 2025-07-06 16:00:45+00:00
Very well written and a joy to read.

Yes, IDEs of the future will not look like those we have today. I too started with Cursor and similar VS Code enhanced IDEs. And ended up using Claude Code. And realised my terminal is more important for me now. So I migrated from iTerm to Ghostty (faster, lighter, more modern), Tmux and Tmuxinator, and NeoVim! Because I just cat/bat files and occasionally edit a file, if at all. Claude Code does the heavy lifting, I write specs and prompts, in NeoVim or Emacs. And I am loving my workflow.

I too use Claude Code for more then just generating code. Whenever I need to rewrite a config file (for zsh, neovim, ghostty, etc), I start Claude code and assign the task to do it. It will do the changes and even refactor my settings file in a few minute.

Lastly, I use it to ask questions about my codebase, refactor code, let it document my code, even make meaningful commits.

Pure awesomeness.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-07-06 16:00:58+00:00
Let's step through this example.

All Xbox games around 2004 were physical CDs. Many had online services attached to them. Eventually, those servers were turned off. You can still play LAN and singleplayer. You still have your access to the physical bytes on the disk (though there is copy protection).

What should companies be required to do regarding the servers?
by beala | 2025-07-06 16:00:59+00:00
I've thought about hosting my side projects in my basement, but then I'd be susceptible to power outages and ISP downtime. If a drive fails while I'm traveling I'm SOL. If I accidentally lock myself out, there's no serial terminal to fall back on. I could go the route of those folks on r/homelab, but then it's no longer clear I'm saving money, especially if you factor in my time. My conclusion is that cloud providers are actually a great deal and benefit from huge economies of scale.
by pyman | 2025-07-06 16:01:25+00:00
Two years ago, I saw myself as a really good Python engineer. Now I'm building native mobile apps, desktop apps that talk to Slack, APIs in Go, and full web apps in React, in hours or days!

It feels like I've got superpowers. I love it. I feel productive, fast, creative. But at night, there's this strange feeling of sadness. My profession, my passion, all the things I worked so hard to learn, all the time and sacrifices, a machine can now do most of it. And the companies building these tools are just getting started.

What does this mean for the next generation of engineers? Where's it all heading? Do you feel the same?
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-06 16:01:53+00:00
Funnily enough, I still mostly just listen to the radio, especially in my car. I turn it on, done. No selecting tracks or streams, no fiddling with aux cords, bluetooth, it's just the easiest thing.

I had a walkman in the early 1980s, and really didn't end up using it that much, for similar reasons. They ate batteries, a cassette tape would run for about 20-30 minutes before you had to turn it over, so one tape got repetitive pretty quickly, and carrying more than a few tapes became inconvenient if you were out and about.

I later got a walkman-like device that was just a radio, which was much lighter and more practical if I was out on a long walk or run.
by bmgoau | 2025-07-06 16:02:30+00:00
The ecosystem, that you and I and we depend on, outside your apartment can't install an air conditioner. Instead it simply dies. Then we begin to suffer just in new and unexpected ways.

Climate change doesn't just make it a bit hotter at home - it corrodes the entire environment. Floods, fires, storms, drought, crop yields, etc.

It will make us all poorer and then it will start to kill many of us directly with heat or indirectly through secondary effects (including war). And we'll discover too late that our prosperity depends on the prosperity of each other and the environment.

No man is an island.
by dijit | 2025-07-06 16:03:02+00:00
That would be frustrating to code for.

Before anyone says that its as simple as a switch statement, it’s not, its date enumeration and a switch statement, and an alternative codepath for testing and more assets: on every hot path, when you already only get 8ms for your frame is an annoying cost.

The expiration date properly visible is not a terrible idea though; or at least a “this edition is valid for x years” after which, updates that fix issues may remove content. Hrm.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 16:03:23+00:00
Love this conclusion about how reduced friction from LLM assistance helps with that last 20% of actually shopping a side project:

> The most exciting thing about this entire journey for me is not the app I built, but that I am now able to scratch my coding itch and ship polished side projects again. It's like I found an extra 5 hours every day, and all it cost me was $200 a month.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-06 16:03:34+00:00
How the heck is 0,0 still available! Was nobody interested in this position before for any purpose?

Is there a way to list what's all in geostationary orbit (either stationary at the equator, or at which longitudes they commonly cross through the equator)? Edit: found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellites_in_geosynch... (geosynchronous is a superset of geostationary). The closest is H2Sat at 0.5°. Article notes: "Some of these satellites are separated from each other by as little as 0.1° longitude [or] approximately 73 km". Trickier than keeping them apart is apparently getting a narrow enough communications beam width. /edit.

How long until we can see this ring above the equator from the ground? Although I guess the thickness would rival Saturn's rings and we would probably not be able to make it out even if the sats were shoulder to shoulder. We do see satellites from the ground when the sun hits them right, but those are typically around 1000x closer