MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomwheeler | 2025-07-31 18:56:02+00:00
> The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.

> Why is this so hard for the film industry?

My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...

To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
Communicating efficient circadian light for SAD therapy
by galenheninger | 2025-07-31 18:56:09+00:00
This is a draft of a social media post I wrote about light therapy. I'd appreciate any feedback on it, maybe especially on how it might be received - how should I revise it to be less potentially annoying or more persuasive? Thanks!

"An anecdotal cure for some people with seasonal affective disorder is exposure to light similar in intensity to daylight (104 - 105 lumens/m2) which normal therapy doesn't provide. E.g. at least ~16 8 watt bulbs at 100 lumens per watt shining on one square meter. (Maybe using a diffuser and aluminum foil.)

Besides being dim, lamps branded for therapy (with an exception from this year), including the most recommended ones (and most LEDs), also miss the circadian light spectrum. Here’s a database (including light spectra) on led bulbs that don't. https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database

https://optimizeyourbiology.com/best-sad-light-therapy-lamps also has reviews measuring the output of SAD lamps, including the new one I mentioned (SOL PhotoVites). This lamp and the solution above are examples that are good for the goal of efficiency in circadian light and convenient for testing bright circadian light."
by eddd-ddde | 2025-07-31 18:56:28+00:00
The way I see it is that LLMs and humans are not inherently different. They are simply on different segments of a very complex spectrum of sensory input and physical output. Over time this position on the spectrum changes, for both LLMs and humans too.

With this in mind, it's all matter of what are your metrics for "trust". If you are placing trust on a human employee because it was hired, does this mean the trust comes from the hiring process? What if the LLM passed went through that too?

About familiarity and history: we are at the point were many people will start working at a new place were the strangers are the humans, you will actually be more familiar and history with LLM tools than actual humans, so how do you take that into consideration?

Obviously this is a massive simplification and reduction of the problem, but I'm still not convinced humans get a green checkmark of quality and trust just because they are humans and were hired by a company.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-07-31 18:57:13+00:00
You're right. Some with a academic slant I knew took biology and ended up working as park conservationists. That allowed them to be outdoors and do assessments for research.

I'll also concede that some proponents for trades will argue that their work is cerebral, but this probably depends on the job. Dev can be like that too. I knew union guys who would describe their work as pretty rote and dull despite the long hours (even for electrical), and others who'd say it was interesting.
by bodhi_mind | 2025-07-31 18:57:18+00:00
If it’s something simple, I’ll use Django template because it’s very easy. Most stuff I work on these days requires more fancy ui so I’ll 100% use react or nextjs for front end (and I’ve be using zustand for state management). I’ll have an api util that uses axios and handles appending a jwt auth header to all requests and use that in my components. I like using Django-all-auth because it makes integrating email/google/microsoft auth really easy out of the box.

DRF is good, ninja is a little more light weight and flexible so it really comes down to the project.
by Kirby64 | 2025-07-31 18:57:44+00:00
> Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck.

“Paycheck to paycheck” isn’t really accurate if you can contribute to retirement, emergency fund savings, and give additional money to your family. Far from it. You could pull back on any or all of those contributions and have extra slack. Also, presumably you’ll eventually have enough emergency fund and that slack will be available soon.
by eyberg | 2025-07-31 18:57:44+00:00
microvms as espoused by things like firecracker offer full machines but have tradeoffs like no gpu (which makes it boot faster)

hyperlight shaves way more off - (eg: no access to various devices that you'd find via qemu or firecracker) it does make use of virtualization but it doesn't try to have a full blown machine so it's better for things like embedding simple functions - I actually think it's an interesting concept but it is very different than what firecracker is doing
by shanemhansen | 2025-07-31 18:58:15+00:00
You are right but it's confusing because there are two different approaches. I guess you could say both approaches improve performance by eliminating context switches and system calls.

1. Kernel bypass combined with DMA and techniques like dedicating a CPU to packet processing improve performance.

2. What I think of as "removing userspace from the data plane" improves performance for things like sendfile and ktls.

To your point, Quic in the kernel seems to not have either advantage.
by QuantumGood | 2025-07-31 18:59:13+00:00
You have to love what you're serving. I produced over 70 public events for people wanting to learn voiceover. We had a feature roadmap and wishlist, and we worked our way through it over the years. Many (talent, recording, and advertising) studio owners came and coached at minimal cost because we had such a great reputation for doing it right at low cost to attendees. The great people who wanted to be associated with it, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved was incredibly fulfilling.

We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time.

We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training.

I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.
by Nzen | 2025-07-31 18:59:36+00:00
I considered the section about programs interrogating one another to accomplish some goal [0] the most evocative idea. I'll admit that my limited fantasies resembled something that resembled swagger's openapi or hateoas.

When I heard about Anthropic's model context protocol [1], it reminded me of this talk. I feel pretty skeptical that llm based systems are apt to craft a pigdin with a tool, as that seems like the kind of interaction that would use up lots of the context window. I'll grant that I've heard of people working around that by having their llm leave a summary of their session [2], to bootstrap the next, fresh session. I guess one could leave a pigdin dictionary that suited the llm traning data, as well.

[0] intro starts at 13:13, regarding arpanet, but description starts at 13:53

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/learn/architecture

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661223

<edit to add> Also, Bret Victor's team was able to involve the light pens mentioned in his dynamicland research group / lab.

[3] https://dynamicland.org/archive/2015/Dynamic_Library
by standardUser | 2025-07-31 18:59:58+00:00
I wonder what the material difference is between borrowing a film from the library (is this DVD? Blu-ray? Streaming?) and downloading it from a peer-to-peer network.

I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.
Show HN: We built Roomsy – a better way to manage household chores
by denchikceo | 2025-07-31 19:00:33+00:00
My friend and I recently launched Roomsy - a simple app to track and schedule household chores.

We wanted to quickly test the niche of home cleaning trackers, so we built an MVP in about a month. It’s far from perfect, but it works - and we’d love any feedback or ideas.

If you want to try it out: – On the App Store, use promo code SPARKLE2025 to unlock 1 year free (enter it on the paywall screen). – On Google Play, there’s a 1-year free trial currently available.
by gchamonlive | 2025-07-31 19:01:19+00:00
And good luck trying to find anything marginally erotic, like "Bliss (1997)".

Not only you don't own anything anymore, you can't purchase anything anymore and you can't view content that the overseers deem imoral. At this point pirating is just civil disobedience against the stronghold that corporations have on the American society that ripples across the globalized world.
by mc32 | 2025-07-31 19:01:41+00:00
I'm hopeful that with the aggressive digital tipping options being set to 20%, 30% and 40% Other that people will get exhausted and stop tipping altogether.

With many states implementing $15 minimum wages, it no longer makes sense that tipping would "make up for the difference" between the $7.25 and inflation that people felt guilty about. With $15 minimum wages, we can go back to the days when 10% was "nice service, thank you!" and be done. Good riddance to the extortion.

As a sidenote, minimum wages were never living wages. If you want to see "living wages" stop outsourcing and sending jobs overseas. Low value add service jobs were never going to replace mid-skilled jobs that people were happy to send overseas in order to have $50 sneakers and $10 tee-shirts. Whelp, that undermined everyone's jobs --more people needing SNAP means more taxes for those who still have work...
by al_borland | 2025-07-31 19:01:42+00:00
What I find interesting is that system services, like Time Machine, don’t prevent sleep… even when Sleep Aid showed at setting where it will wake to back up.

About half the time when I wake my MBP there is a notification waiting for me about Time Machine failing to finish because the system went to sleep. My TM drive is a SSD connected with USB-C. First initial backup took maybe 3-5 minutes. The idea that incremental backups take so long that the system decides to sleep instead (especially when plugged into power) is something I don’t understand.

Now that I’m typing this, I wonder if I have a different issue going on. I moved the drive so it’s plugged into my display. The display powers my laptop and acts as a USB hub. I wonder if the monitor going to sleep is killing power to the drive… but I’d expect an improper ejection notice if that was the case.
by danaris | 2025-07-31 19:01:43+00:00
> Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE

This may have been true in the past, but in today's world, normal people have an increasingly hard time affording the things that our parents took for granted (y'know, things like a modest house, a vacation every 2-3 years, decent food). If the owners of a small local business are offered the opportunity to cash out and retire with enough money that they can guarantee their reasonable comfort for the rest of their lives (barring total societal collapse), they're not going to worry about what's "healthy" or "thriving". And PE companies can afford to do that.

Nor does the fact that they're struggling reflect on the industry that the local business happens to be in. It reflects on our entire system today.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-31 19:02:03+00:00
Lets analyze one cpu instruction in your scenario: the comparison used to decide whether to resize. You have to remember that PGO operates to optimize each individual branching instruction, not the whole program.

So every time you add something to the hashtable, it will check the current size against the next size it needs to resize. 90% of the time, then 99% of the time, then 99.9% of the time and so on the answer will be 'no, there is space left'. This is just because the size goes up geometrically (in general) so a very low % of insert operations trigger a resize. The 'high probability branch' for "if current_size == max_size" should always be false. This is independent of workload. The compiler would not know whether that comparison is 'almost always true' or 'almost always false' which might lead the CPU's branch predictor to guess wrong, which will lead to pipeline stalls.

Read up on how pipelined, superscaler cpu's work to understand why this is very important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_stall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predication_(computer_architec...
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-31 19:02:14+00:00
I love brave's native ad blocking, so the idea of _even MOAR_ ad blocking appeals to me. But what is the distinction between "1st party ads" vs 3rd party? I'm a noob in this arena, so I'd need an example.

other notes:

- Love the discussion of features instead of vibes

- Even though I don't understand the comparison table, I appreciate the attempt at quick summary.

- I'm not even a fan of Kagi, if anything I'm mildy opposed. But "a browser with less ads / more privacy" may legitimately win me over.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-31 19:02:30+00:00
Zig seems like a better approach but I still remember the carbon C killer video from fireship before that channel was bought by vc funding and turned into AI slop news reporter most likely using AI.

I don't even watch fireship anymore. I actively resist the urge to. There are some other better channels like typecraft or primagen or dreams of code and so many other enthusiasts, there is this one bash guy that I watch whose having fun in life doing side quests like going to gym and gardening and I am all for that too.
Show HN: Tight Studio – impressive screen recordings made easy
by hitchyhocker | 2025-07-31 19:02:41+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Ethan, founder of Tight Studio. (As Tuco said to Heisenberg - Tight tight tight)

I'm excited to introducte Tight Studio 1.0 - the easiest way to prepare impressive screen recordings. Now publicly available at http://tight.studio/.

Tight Studio 1.0 features: * one-click smart captions - lots of people play video on social media without sound on. We greatly simplify this for you with one-click auto captions, filler words removal, and simple editing tools if needed. -> comparing to existing solutions, we allow you to generate captions much more easily and edit them easily if needed * smart auto zoom-in - without auto zoom-in, audience could lose details on what you are trying to highlight, this is especially true when you want to highlight small texts within a large screen * common video clipping and style customization tools to polish your screen recordings.

We are also offering 50% early supporter discount for the first 100 subscribers, you will get 50% discount for lifetime for Tight Studio screen recorder!

We are shipping quickly at tight quality, and we have much more to come on the roadmap. We would also love to incorporate any feature request you may have, please let me know!
by Jemaclus | 2025-07-31 19:02:46+00:00
I think you should ask yourself that last question again, and this time really think about it. Why /do/ all companies seem to have managers?

(Tone clarification: I'm not approaching this in a condescending manner, but more of a "let's talk through this problem out loud and see where it gets us." So please don't take this as condescension.)

One way to think about "obvious" solutions to problems, such as a "no manager" solutuon, is this: if it's so obvious, why is no one doing it? For example, I worked for a grocery delivery startup for a while. Every single new hire, without fail, would show up at the end of the first week and say "I have a great idea, why don't we let users shop by recipe?"

On its face, it sounds like a brilliant idea! One intuition-based shortcut to find the answer is: if that's such an obvious thing, why doesn't Amazon or Kroger or Safeway or HEB or any of the major grocery chains let you do that?

And of course, the answer is: that's not how users shop. If it worked, the big players would be doing it. They're not. Are you smarter than Amazon? Probably not. That's not to say a smaller group can't innovate past Amazon, but Amazon has some /really fucking smart people/ working for them, and the odds are fantastically small that you'll out-think them. (You can certainly out-_pivot_ them by doing something faster than they can, but if it turns out to be valuable, in the long run, they'll do it too.)

So when you approach a conversation like this and say, "Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?", one way to do a quick sanity check on it is: can you think of successful companies that are run that way?

You probably can't. I certainly can't.

There's a similar problem in the theatre world. It is universally understood that someone doing a 60 second monologue for an audition is _the worst way to evaluate theatrical performance_... except for everything else.

And similarly, it appears, based on scanning the successful companies, that having managers is possibly also the worst way to ensure performance... except for everything else.

So... managers it is. It's unlikely that there's a better way to do this at scale. Many people have tried. Management chains always win.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-31 19:03:13+00:00
From what I understand the ”killer app” initially was because of mobile spotty networks. TCP is interface (and IP) specific, so if you switch from WiFi to LTE the conn breaks (or worse, degrades/times out slowly). QUIC has a logical conn id that continues to work even when a peer changes the path. Thus, your YouTube ads will not buffer.

Secondary you have the reduced RTT, multiple streams (prevents HOL blocking), datagrams (realtime video on same conn) and you can scale buffers (in userspace) to avoid BDP limits imposed by kernel. However.. I think in practice those haven’t gotten as much visibility and traction, so the original reason is still the main one from what I can tell.
by manmal | 2025-07-31 19:03:39+00:00
Since agents are good only at greenfield projects, the logical conclusion is that existing codebases have to be prepared such that new features are (opinionated) greenfield projects - let all the wiring dangle out of the wall so the intern just has to plug in the appliance. All the rest has to be done by humans, or the intern will rip open the wall to hang a picture.
by krackers | 2025-07-31 19:03:40+00:00
> application can prevent sleep _when you close the lid_

Ordinarily it can't, it's not possible to set a IOPMAssertion that prevents sleep on lid close. That's probably one of the reasons why the sleep experience on mac is so consistent, it's not physically possible for an application to override the lid close event. (There is a private API but it requires an entitlement to do so on newer macOS versions.) That said there are always legacy APIs and bugs.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-07-31 19:03:40+00:00
At the same time, proponents have said that the whole idea of the database is to detect people with suspicious behavior.

Also, this is still nothing like getting a warrant to a wire tap - any suspicion will reveal YEARS of private information about you to the investigators. Furthermore, knowing that this can be used to identify suspects, surely it will have an effect on peoples behaviors.

They propose to include health records! What if you like to read about bomb making out of curiosity, have a relative who is in jail for violence, and you start seeing a psychiatrist? How many boxes have to be ticked before a flag is raised, and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?

I also don't trust the police to not make mistakes or behave unethically enough to be comfortable with this. Denmark is not a very corrupt country, but we still see misuse of power. Just recently it was revealed how a police handler explicitly instructed an informant to lie in court and frame someone else, just so the handler could keep his source. Are these the kind of people who should have access to my search history and health data? No fucking thanks.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-31 19:04:40+00:00
> Do you have any specific models/lines you'd reccomend?

My current thinkpad is a T14 5th gen w/ AMD, and everything worked OOTB with both Ubuntu and Fedora.

You can always double check particular models/configurations on ThinkWiki(https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki), or Ubuntu certifications (https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops?q=&limit=120&vendor=Len...) or RedHat's equivalent(https://catalog.redhat.com/en/search?searchType=Hardware&par...)

Generally, the newer the hardware, the more you need a more recent kernel which may have been what you ran into with Debian. I've had laptops that worked in Fedora & Arch, but Debian & Ubuntu didn't have a recent enough kernel for the WiFi adapter. If you still have that laptop might be worth it to give it another shot depending on how long ago you tried, Trixie may work on it.
by mindslight | 2025-07-31 19:04:40+00:00
I agree that's what the people have wanted to say and that they believe it is what they have said, but they get taken in by simplistic populist messages that transmute their frustration into support for the next corpo con long into when the results have become apparent. But for 2024 the usual excuses of "he reneged", "stick with the incumbent", or "less bad option" don't even work - it's a clear case of people putting their foot on the gas with a known quantity, but thinking it must be a good thing because those other people are really upset about it.
by metalman | 2025-07-31 19:04:45+00:00
There is the anti discussion, about where to know is to be ruined in some way, which is valid, the inference I get is that there is merit in engineering your approach to a career in engineering, and for some fickle few that clearly works, everybody else has to self decieve or seek help in that, or the world would grind to a halt. The game is stacked for those who can chanell there primal urges into abstractions and other disiplined outlets, the rest end up represed , acting out or some combination that is less "efficient"