MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tacticalturtle | 2025-07-08 14:02:13+00:00
I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.

Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.

The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them
by robin_reala | 2025-07-08 14:02:34+00:00
If you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 and haven’t heard the original 500-mile email story, you can read it at https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles.

(discussed previously on HN 5 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 – and 10 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708)
by nerevarthelame | 2025-07-08 14:03:30+00:00
I'm heavily involved in DragonRealms [0]. Its older brother GemStone is still kicking around too.

Players of both games built an open source Ruby-based scripting engine called Lich [1] that allows insanely complex levels of automation. When I "play" the game I'm usually writing scripts to share with the community and optimizing my training configuration.

Both games have 30+ years of dedicated development and insanely deep lore and history. They've embraced micro-transactions to stay financially solvent, but participating in that is absolutely not necessary.

[0]: https://www.play.net/dr/ [1]: https://github.com/elanthia-online/lich-5
Show HN: Pobshell: A Bash-like shell to explore live Python object hierarchies
by cogs | 2025-07-08 14:03:42+00:00
Meet Pobshell. Think cd, ls, cat, and find — but for Python objects instead of files.

Stroll around your code, runtime state, and data structures. Inspect everything: modules, classes, live objects. Plus recursive search and CLI integration.

40s video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d4DgVnqWjQ

What it's for:

- Exploratory debugging: Inspect live object state on the fly

- Understanding APIs: Examine code, docstrings, class trees

- Shell integration: Pipe object state or code snippets to LLMs or OS tools

- Code and data search: Recursive search for object state or source without file paths

- REPL & paused script: Explore runtime environments dynamically

- Teaching & demos: Make Python internals visible and walkable

Pobshell is pick‑up‑and‑play: familiar commands plus optional new tricks.

Install: pip install pobshell

Pobshell is open source, and in alpha release. Tested on MacOs, Linux and Windows (Python 3.12)
by tmvphil | 2025-07-08 14:04:34+00:00
You can define AGI however you want I suppose, but I would consider it achieved when AI can achieve at least about median human performance on all cognitive tasks. Obviously computers are useful well before this point, but it is clearly meaningful line in the sand, useful enough to merit having a dedicated name like "AGI". Constructed tasks like ARC-AGI simply quantify what everyone can already see, which is that current models cannot be used as a drop-in replacement for humans in most cases.

To me, superintelligence means specifically either dominating us in our highest intellectual accomplishments, i.e. math, science, philosophy or literally dominating us via subordinating or eliminating humans. Neither of these things have happened at all.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-08 14:04:43+00:00
I get aredox' point that copyright at least makes some things more complicated.

See for example the drama around Darkover fanfiction ([1], [2]):

Quote from [1]:

"For many years, Bradley actively encouraged Darkover fan fiction. She encouraged submissions from unpublished authors and reprinted some of it in commercial Darkover anthologies. This ended after a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to one of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction."

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marion_Zimmer_Bra...

[2] https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/articl...
by drweevil | 2025-07-08 14:04:56+00:00
The blame games on the climate and NOAA budgeting, Biden/Trump to blame etc. are just a smoke screen. The area is called Flash Flood Alley for a reason. The shallow soil, hilly topography, and local climate means that flash flooding is not an uncommon or unforeseeable event. So if local and state officials are serious about saving lives, there is one solution that they have the power to implement: zoning. Prohibit building anywhere within the high-water mark of a stream. Prohibit building anywhere water runs off (In Texas, they say, nothing is more dangerous than a dry creek bed).

So if you are a local or state level official, this is what is under your control. The problem tho is that unlike the hypotheticals, taking a stand on this would require action, and/or taking responsibility.
by azonenberg | 2025-07-08 14:05:30+00:00
Yes, Vitesse had been on my "naughty list" of companies that were permanently banned from getting a design win from me because of refusing to share any docs or sell parts at distributors or other engineer-hostile practices popular with the likes of Marvell and Broadcom.

After MCHP bought them and opened up (what I thought was) the full datasheet I gave them a second chance. Seems they still held some back.
by ecshafer | 2025-07-08 14:05:33+00:00
The funding is one angle, but the Shopify Ruby team isn't that big (<10 people iirc). Python is used extensively at just about every tech company, and Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon each have at least 10x as many engineers as Shopify. This makes me think that there must be some kind of language/ecosystem reason that makes Python much harder than Ruby to optimize.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-08 14:05:45+00:00
> I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary.

Well, here you go: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niche#did-you-kno...

> I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not.

Same. This is where diacritics would fix the problem: Hyperbolé. Although hyperbolee would also work, of course.
by xnx | 2025-07-08 14:06:04+00:00
> I Lost Joy of Programming

I found the joy of making things.

As a technical person who is not a professional programmer, but finds or makes whatever I need, LLMs (Gemini) are dizzyingly powerful.

I've made so many things I never would never have even attempted without it: a change-based timelapse tool, virtual hand-controlled web-based theremin, automated sunrise and sunset webcam timelapse creator, healthy-eating themed shoot'em up, content-based podcast ad removal tool, virtual linescan camera, command line video echo effect, video player progress bar benchmark tool, watermark remover, irregular panoramic photo normalizer, QR code game of live, 3D terrain bike share usage map, movie "barcode" generator, tool to edit video by transcript, webcam-based window parallax effect, hidden-image mosaic generator, and all kinds of other toys I've already lost track of.
by lxgr | 2025-07-08 14:06:10+00:00
That’s exactly my point: Why on Earth do I need a separate computer to mediate the backup?

iOS natively supports SMB over any network connection including wired Ethernet, mounting encrypted APFS volumes on USB storage devices at 10 Gbps etc.

It’s Apples explicit vision that an iPad Pro can replace a Mac even for some professional users. Why don’t these deserve local backups?
by throw0101d | 2025-07-08 14:06:17+00:00
> […] you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0].

Back in 1999 Intel used amplified thermal noise from analog circuits on their chips to generate randomness:

* PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20100714102630/https://www.crypt...

This was further refined and in 2011 they published how RdRand (formerly "Bull Mountain") works:

* https://spectrum.ieee.org/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-gen...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND

* PDF: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/doc...

So classical computers can generate randomness if you have the right circuits for it.
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-08 14:06:29+00:00
I clicked the “go” button just to see the typical format, and it gave… zero results. Because the example is “e.g. integer vector addition” and it doesn't strip away the “e.g.” part!

Apart from that, I find the search results too sparse (doesn't contain the prototype) and the result page too verbose (way too much fluff in the description, and way too much setup in the example; honestly, who cares about <stdio.h>[1]), so I'll probably stick to the existing x86/Arm references.

[1] Also, the contrast is set so low that I literally cannot read all of the example.
by neltnerb | 2025-07-08 14:06:37+00:00
Maybe it's just me but I feel entirely comfortable asking questions like "how much math did you take? do you remember what a derivative is?" and base my explanations on the response. Turns out fine every time so far... and if they don't remember what a derivative is (or whatever) then I just explain it differently no big deal. I'd almost argue it is easier than not asking, but only if I actually care about them understanding the answer.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-08 14:06:57+00:00
Because caring directly about shareholder value is a distraction from what I'm actually there to do. If I focus on shareholders, that leaves less time and energy doing my actual job and would make it more likely that I make decisions that make our products worse. If I'm doing that, then what's the point? I may as well be an MBA or something.

There is division of responsibilities for a reason. I also don't care directly about the bookkeeping, HR, etc., for the same reason. That's not to say I don't care in the absolute. I just don't (and can't) care about those things directly. I contribute by doing good work.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-07-08 14:07:12+00:00
> They like tips.

They like money. Service workers tend to like tips (which provide variable income) over stable higher wages mostly I think because the latter is one they just haven't experienced. Instead they get a choice between low wages and tips or low wages without tips. Hardly a choice.

Also, tips do not always go to the harder working employees. With tip request spreading far and wide, I often see them in places where there is little work even involved. If I buy a bottle of water from a take-out fast food place I'm expected to tip, but the same bottle of water from a convenience store I'm not expected to tip? Who was working harder here exactly?
by aredox | 2025-07-08 14:07:15+00:00
Because you have to find and pay everyone who had the same idea.

The alternatve is to do "cleanroom writing": you don't interact, therefore if you write something similar, you can argue you independently invented it.

I had the same problem in a scientific research lab where collaboration with another lab runs the risk of not being able to patent an idea, because if the other team had the same idea or anything close enough to it, we couldn't claim to be the inventors.
by rograndom | 2025-07-08 14:07:51+00:00
Ha! I had one of those in the late 90's. My father had it first and I inherited it when he passed. A couple of months after he bought it, I bought a 1985 LTD, which was basically a 4 door Mustang GT. He asked me if I wanted to race, I said it wouldn't be close. He said "Both cars have the same engine." Yeah, not quite. The Thunderbird had like 120hp, no fuel injection and bogged down to meet emissions, while the LTD had close to 200hp and was several hundred pounds lighter. Another person up the street had the same vintage Thunderbird with the 350ci and had done some work to it. That one went pretty good.
by azonenberg | 2025-07-08 14:08:49+00:00
This is why I used a VSC PHY. After they bought Microsemi (and Vitesse as a division of Microsemi) it looked like the only viable option to get a QSGMII PHY since all the other players were much worse.

When I first started the project in 2012-13, Vitesse was just as NDA-happy and I ruled them out. The original roadmap called for a 24-port switch with 24 individual TI DP83867 SGMII PHYs on three 8-port line cards.
by lamroger | 2025-07-08 14:08:54+00:00
Been in LA for 2 years now and went to college in LA 10 years ago so have some data points to compare.

Startups in LA are interesting. Back in the day, there was a lot of Ad Tech / advent of big data. This is when Snapchat and Hulu were coming up. I’d go on Angellist and see who was hiring and who’d be down to meet.

Now, especially post covid, I feel sparks of excitement. I missed the crypto hype in LA so that was probably wild and weird. a16z opened an office in Santa Monica and do their speedrun accelerator. Focused on games and media it seems.

upfront hosted some cool cowork and mingle events too.

Two meetups I regularly go to is AI Tinkerers and MLOps. Generally it’s the same small crowd. I went to a Ruby meetup which was cool too.

Less of a young startup crowd. Maybe people got older and rich and retired early.
by azangru | 2025-07-08 14:10:07+00:00
> Wasm-compiled SQLite is so successful that it actually replaced a part of the web platform, causing Chrome to remove WebSQL entirely

The causual inference here is almost certainly incorrect. According to Chrome Blog [0], WebSQL turned out to be a non-starter as early as November 2010, which is before Webassembly was released, and before it became known that SQLite could be ported to Webassembly to run in web browser.

[0] - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deprecating-web-sql
by Aurornis | 2025-07-08 14:11:07+00:00
When you get into high volume production, the vendors have their own engineers who will work with you directly. Depending on the arrangement and your volume they might bill you for the time, require you to buy blocks of support hours, or they might bend over backward to help you out in any way possible if you’re buying enough parts from them.

Dealing with small clients is not a priority for most part vendors. Many of them won’t even sell you chips at all until you can qualify yourself as a big customer or, in some cases, buy a license to start designing with their parts for six figures or more.

Unfortunately for the small players, it’s not a priority for most companies to support small customers who might only buy a couple thousand parts or less.
by ajdjcbxjxnx | 2025-07-08 14:11:12+00:00
I’m fully in agreement with your post except for

> but they don't have to be imo

Are there any historical examples you’ve seen of this working? ie a society not binding over race / religion?

I’ve come to terms with religion being necessary, even if I don’t prescribe to it. I benefitted heavily from growing up in a white, christian european society even though I rebelled against it.

And after personally seeing good candidates (everyone passed them with highest marks) get turned down for jobs because they were white/asian males, it really opened my eyes to the whole world being tribal and I was the one tricked into thinking an alternative was possible.

I still like to think it’s possible, but I don’t see evidence for it.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-07-08 14:11:58+00:00
TacticsMaster on F-Droid also says it has 100k puzzles, sourced from https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles, though that says it has 5 million puzzles, so perhaps 100k is just a coincidence, a nice number, or maybe of the 5m there's a nice subset.

> Generating these chess puzzles took more than 100 years of CPU time.

The page includes a link to the puzzle generator and tagger for interests sake.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-08 14:14:06+00:00
> The only vendor I actually enjoy working with to any degree is ST, and only design boards using their uC's for that reason.

ST has good documentation most of the time, but for a while some of their higher end MCUs had a lot of weird bugs and errata that were simply not documented. I haven’t used any of their modern parts recently but I’ve heard the situation has started improving. I have some friends who were ready to abandon ST altogether after losing so much time on a design to undocumented bugs and parts not behaving as documented.
by lxgr | 2025-07-08 14:14:08+00:00
Sometimes you need publicly verifiable randomness, and then your own hardware (which you might or might not even trust privately, depending on how much you trust your vendors) isn’t much help.

If you still think that's idiotic, I'm happy to bet against you in an unbiased* coin flip simulated on my machine which you unfortunately can't inspect :)
by Incipient | 2025-07-08 14:14:55+00:00
The model itself I'm actually less fussed about. The integration with the ide and the ability to easily get the model the right context is what I struggle with (vscode is passable with the recent 101 update). I find pretty much all models in copilot offer similar-ish performance.

I've been looking for good/best-practice workflow setups to work with docker python/fastapi backends and vue frontends...but I haven't found much.

If anyone has tips for where to look, I'd genuinely appreciate it!
by subscribed | 2025-07-08 14:14:55+00:00
In most of the supermarkets down here, couple of miles from M25. I mean, outside, so its probably considered third-world country, but no, no need to reduce the argument ad absurdum.

Or 2 metres from the window a mile from Hammersmith. If not for WiFi calling I'd have to leave my phones on the windowsill.
by ramesh31 | 2025-07-08 14:14:57+00:00
>"Wasm works well where isolation is needed between different program parts written by different people."

Nailed it. We have JS in the browser, and (particularly with TS) it's a great language for building applications on the web. What's great about WASM is the interop layer we have now between other systems. Our company has a mountain of legacy C++, encoding many years of hard-won business logic, and the ability to tap into that on the frontend (locally, in-client) has been amazing. No more hacky transpilation or maintaining separate codebases; just write your FFI and compile the binary to WASM.
by LoveMortuus | 2025-07-08 14:15:28+00:00
It always makes me sad when a language's alphabet is different from their phonetic alphabet because it means that unless you hear how the word is pronounced there's basically no way of know how to pronounce it. Right now I'm learning Portuguese Portuguese and it just makes me so sad that it legit pushed me away from learning the language.

They pronounce 's' at the end on the word the same as how they pronounce 'x' and many many more such examples, basically no word is pronounced the way it's written.

My native language is Slovenian, the way you say the letters in the alphabet is how you pronounce them in 99% of the words and even if you miss-pronounce the 1%, the words are usually so close that people still understand you.

It just really made me appreciate my language even though it has many other things that just makes it difficult to the point that most of my writings are in English, were I don't really need to think about all the rules and can just focus on telling the story.

I'm of the opinion that all languages should use their phonetic alphabet as their alphabet, that way, once you've learned the (phonetical) alphabet you would know how to pronounce all the words. (Unlike in Portuguese where milk is written as 'leite' but it's pronounced very similarly to the word 'light' in English. (not to mention the Brazilian Portuguese)).

And to the Spanish people, your language is just slightly more aligned than Portuguese, but nowhere near as clear as I would like it to be.

I agree with the parent, Greek is much easier to pronounce, at least when compared to Spanish and Portuguese, though though the emphasis of the words not always being at the front of the word can make things a bit difficult, I'm looking at you κοτόπουλο (chicken).
by _heimdall | 2025-07-08 14:15:31+00:00
A UBI is dependent on a top down approach by design, that seems like a given here.

For a UBI to exist the government has to define some kind of system for how to set the basic income level, I assume they would define a basket of goods (and services) similar to how CPI is calculated and define a formula for how the UBI is calculated from there. One way or another, someone in the government would be coming up with a list of what is "essential" and deciding how much to subsidize.

They would also need to similarly define how the UBI is adjusted over time. Prices change over time, and there would likely be a pretty quick jump in prices when the UBI is first put into effect.

All that to say, we will never have a UBI without it being centrally planned from the top. Whether it is authoritarian or not would be up for debate, it can be centrally planned and pushed from the top down without being authoritarian - unless one thinks we're already authoritarian, most of our current federal programs would fit into that category.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-08 14:16:31+00:00
> Plus, we're talking about POSIX here. You don't have a time machine. Shall we argue about just how much POSIX software is out there, working perfectly fine with this technique?

I'd argue this is in spite of choosing a path that makes maintainable software more difficult than it needs to be. Constraints change over time, and the thought process that made this practice rational no longer coheres with modern-day constraints. Maintaining software is now (much, much) more expensive than the performance minutae that led to this cost.

> Sure, in New Fangled Language De Jour™, return as many tuples as your heart desires.

This isn't related to language at all—C may not have tuples, but structs are an equivalent.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-08 14:16:44+00:00
> Are there any historical examples you’ve seen of this working? ie a society not binding over race / religion?

I'm not widely studied enough on History to say that this has never happened, but I think you're right. I am not aware of any

Maybe it is not actually possible without religion, but I like to think that people can find a strong set of shared cultural and social values without the metaphysical aspect of religion
by doekenorg | 2025-07-08 14:16:50+00:00
Just to clarify my intent with posts like this:

I'm not suggesting that PHP is the ideal tool for every use case. The goal is to share a concept that might be unfamiliar to some developers, using PHP as the context.

Sometimes learning about a concept in a familiar language helps you recognise where it might be useful elsewhere or apply it in a language that supports it better.

Terms like coroutines, concurrency, promises, etc, can be confusing; I just like to demystify them with easy-to-grasp examples. That does mean that examples can be contrived or very simple, but they are designed to get the point across.

Thanks for all the comments so far!
by biofox | 2025-07-08 14:16:53+00:00
Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:

Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.

The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.

The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.

And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.
by wink | 2025-07-08 14:17:30+00:00
Not exactly sure what you mean (in German) but just learning about them and using them correctly are 2 completely different things.

I mean, you could maybe ignore the use of going a -> ä for plural forms, I would argue that learning all these words are part of it.

I'm not saying it's hugely complicated but I've seen enough people struggle with it.
by uokesita | 2025-07-08 14:17:46+00:00
Location: Barcelona, Spain Remote: 100%

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: ReactJS, React Native, Ruby On Rails. AI (Langchain, OpenAI, AI SDK)

Tech Stack: Custom Admin Dashboards, AI integrations, Full mobile apps.

Website: https://alamedadev.com

Email: osledy@alamedadev.com