MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-17 01:48:41+00:00
> Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc

My understanding is the majority of his work is on WordPress. It's worth noting this is a partnership with 100+ clients, 5+ full time employees. They do television commercials, websites, banner ads, social media campaigns, etc. He is a partner at the firm and while he calls himself "non-technical" he does have experience with website design (HTML/CSS) and the administration of WordPress and databases.

To be clear: he was already delivering these kind of custom solutions to clients using contract programmers. He is well aware of requirements like authentication (in fact, our last conversation he mentioned a project he was working on that did just that). But previously, the cost of custom work was too high in some cases, since bringing on a contract programmer for certain kinds of projects pushed the budget out of range for the client. Vibe coding is opening up a new avenue for custom built functionality that was previously too expensive.

> I hope that he has the wisdom and humility

I notice this kind of thing frequently. I mean, who is lacking humility here? Someone thinking they have all of the facts, offering advice and "Why don't you just ..." kind of thinking based on assumptions. If you really think you can diagnose issues and offer advice based on the quick comment I made, you should reassess your own humility before recommending it to others.
by zanecodes | 2025-07-17 01:50:10+00:00
The Dell Streak (shoutout to the other 3 people who bought one) had a 5 inch screen in 2010, a notable jump from contemporary phones like the iPhone 4 which was still 3.5", and other Android devices like the HTC Droid series which were around 3.7" and slowly starting to creep upwards to differentiate themselves from the iPhone. I think the largest Android devices you could get at the time were still smaller than 4".
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-17 01:50:48+00:00
Most of the use cases for java are in places where network latency dominates. If Python is fast enough for Uber and Youtube, its fast enough for your service.

When you work with a codebase that doesn't need compilation, the development velocity is quite fast. You don't need to compile, you can prototype features on the fly, you can even write real time updates while the web server is running.

And standard compilation in Java is done in a VERY inefficient manner with groovy - you have groovy that gets compiled to bytecode, which then gets JIT compiled to native, which then actually runs the compilation of the source code to bytecode, and then you have a first startup latency as it gets JIT compiled to native.

All you really need to write any modern app is Python + C. Anything that needs to go fast, just encapsulate in a small C program, and launch that from Python.
by zahlman | 2025-07-17 01:51:03+00:00
> [Software that was officially EOL and no longer supported by the developer as of January 1, 2020 — even though they went back on that with an emergency patch in April] was removed in [an OS released on October 25, 2021], which was incredibly stupid and disruptive as it caught everyone by surprise [despite the fact that the intent to EOL that software was declared many years ahead of time, and that sunset date already represented an extension of multiple years to the usual release schedule].

I will never understand this.

But then, I've been using Python 3 since 3.2 and my first reaction to that was a sigh of relief, and by the time I updated to 3.4 I was already wondering why everyone else was lagging behind on the switch.
by TOGoS | 2025-07-17 01:51:20+00:00
I'm interested in the long piecewise elimination section. Presumably that's where they explain why not use Ocaml/Nim/yaddah yaddah.

If I were to write such a list, the answer would probably come down to "because I wanted to pick ONE and be able to stick with it, and Rust seems solid and not going anywhere." As much as Clojure and Ocaml are, from what I've heard, right up my alley, learning all these different languages has definitely taken time away from getting crap done, like I used to be able to do perfectly well with Java 2 or PHP 5, even though those are horrible languages.
by Scramblejams | 2025-07-17 01:51:28+00:00
A long time ago I did some IT work for a real estate agent in the US that dealt in international properties. I was stoked on a listing he had up for a beautiful French chateau for $40k. He told me to forget it. “It’ll need completely new electrical, all new plumbing. And that might not sound so bad, but just wait till you actually try to get the work done by locals on time and on budget. It won’t happen.”

I took his advice.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-17 01:52:06+00:00
If I counted correctly, in the last 12 days you posted your same project 9 times and made 5 general posts about projects and immediately added a comment with your project.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

If you repost too much, people will get angry, flag your post and send angry emails to the mods that will ban your account and site.
by userbinator | 2025-07-17 01:52:19+00:00
12 years ago a small Chinese company made this Android clone of an iPhone 4, but with additional features:

https://www.gizchina.com/2013/11/07/jiayu-g5-unboxing-hands-...

https://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/18/exclusive-hands-video-st...

https://www.gizmochina.com/2013/09/22/teardown-picture-jiayu...

That was the "peak smartphone" era for me; lots of companies making slightly different variations on Androids, at relatively low prices, but almost all of them with the same basic set of practical features which are nearly extinct today. Now it seems all we get are faster CPUs and RAM, more (non-removable) storage and battery capacity, no headphone jacks, a very limited choice of screen sizes, and far too many cameras along with the obligatory unremovable spyware and locked-down OS.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-17 01:52:21+00:00
> They spend a ton of money developing and marketing it.

I beg to differ. How much marketing money did Apple spend on the mini line, in comparison to the "standard" size ?

> And when launched - no one buys it.

Pixel 3 and 4a are still the most sold phones in the Pixel line.

The news when Pixel7 was launched:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/this-is-the...
by jchw | 2025-07-17 01:52:25+00:00
Well, do you think this is a good state of affairs? On one hand, phones are pretty accessible devices, on the other hand there are many aspects of phones that are objectively pretty terrible for consumers (talking about cost and difficulty of repair, walled garden ecosystems, and generally being geared towards consuming things and a lot less effective at producing them than laptops and desktops.)

(Tangential: of course I don't blame anyone for bringing their phone with them everywhere but if you're going to go to a friend group hangout, consider how annoying it is when you're trying to talk to someone and they're clearly checked out browsing some slop on Twitter or talking to someone else entirely. Take a damn break from the phone!)
by aaron695 | 2025-07-17 01:53:11+00:00
Where I am it's $90,000 - $240,000 to subdivide land from one to two.

Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.

Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.

On top of all this is the years to divide the property.

On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.

On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.

These all have a $$$ cost.

$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.

So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.
by nullc | 2025-07-17 01:53:27+00:00
Are plants not already capturing the energy embedded in cold LNG for degasification?

(e.g. you could do so by running a traditional nat gas electrical generator, then using the waste heat to preheat the LNG and then using the resulting higher pressure output to drive a turbine.)

This can be done efficiently enough that it's been proposed that liquefying air during times of excess energy then 'discharging' it with the aid of natgas peakers may be a competitive technique for energy storage. The round trip for liquifying air is pretty poor, but the additional energy from the natgas waste heat which is too low grade against traditional heatskinks to usefully extract more energy makes up for it, and the natgas peakers are running at exactly the time you want to discharge the liquid air battery.

So the energy cost of using that process as the required heat-sink for this capture process should be the energy that would have been generated by an alternative process like the above.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-17 01:53:51+00:00
Just thinking out loud:

-Informal rules are useful. Funny when you see the gap between "people are people" and the formal rules. Intention vs effect.

-Formal rules can also be useful (usually of the save you some thinking type, when they are). But that's overshadowed by their moral weight, their legible consequences. They are not easy to change! If we see the work that went into them, we can forgive. But not forget.

-The deliberations are mostly secret. From all sorts of distrust.

-so for formal rules: transparency (in both intention and reasoning), usefulness, & malleability are knobs to tweak. Sounds obvious, though.

Alongside negotiation skills, and less obvious, "moral identity". It's hard to hire people who are more or less aligned in those dimensions
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-17 01:54:09+00:00
Doesn't it really depend on what we're reading? I generally wouldn't want to skip any words in a fiction novel. I would love to skip words in most self-help books that turn out to be 3 paragraphs of "the point" and 100-200 pages of fluff to get the book on the shelf. Another perfect example is nearly any online recipe with 25 screens of fluff at the top to get to the 1 screen recipe.
by hollywood_court | 2025-07-17 01:54:20+00:00
Uh no. Our culture and society have told folks to go to college for so long like it’s their only chance for success.

I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry.

I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training.

A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
by dskhatri | 2025-07-17 01:55:06+00:00
Thank you! I have been an Emacs user/consumer for many years. This project finally got me into the proverbial weeds, a fun venture, learning elisp, exploring the Org code base especially around the export backends [1]. It was useful going through the one.el source code as well, and I now write my blog in Emacs, rendering it using this package [2].

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/org/o... [2] https://github.com/tonyaldon/one.el
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 01:55:07+00:00
Recruiting, as a whole, has been extremely harmed by technology and has therefore become an incredibly low-trust game.

There's only losers here. For companies, they can't find good candidates. They're inundated with fake resumes, even fake interviews. They're bombarded by bots.

For job seekers, they can't distinguish themselves. It's devolved into a sick numbers game. Want to get a job? Send the most applications. 100, 500, 1,000 - whatever it takes. 99% of jobs won't even so much as email you telling you you've been rejected. Just the logistics of keeping up with so many applications will eat the job seekers time.
by seadan83 | 2025-07-17 01:55:17+00:00
> But is it better than no therapy? That's what matters.

Seemingly no, it is _worse_ than no therapy.

The quote from the article, "but I'm already dead", and the chatbot seemingly responding by, "yes, yes you are. Let's explore that more shall we." Sounds worse than nothing. Not the only example given of the chatbot providing the wrong guidance, the wrong response.
by MostlyStable | 2025-07-17 01:55:32+00:00
It does not surprise me that the things that "internet" people want are not generally popular. What I don't understand is why that means they can't make money selling them anyways. Companies used to make money when the entire cell phone market was _dramatically_ smaller than today. Sure, maybe only 5% of customers want that phone, but 5% of a huge market is still a lot of people! I just have trouble believing that there isn't room for serving that segment of the consumer base.
by techjamie | 2025-07-17 01:55:55+00:00
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?

I got my hands on a Dell that was retired out of an office somewhere for $30+shipping. Add the cost of a couple HDDs, time spent removing a disc drive and installing Linux, I got myself a cheap backup server on my LAN.

They're great for machines you don't want to drop a lot on for basic utilities.
by bane | 2025-07-17 01:55:56+00:00
I dunno, this seems kind of junk sciency. There's all kinds of reasons to walk all kinds of ways. Walking on toes, or pointing your feet have almost never been a notable feature of people I know who are clearly on the spectrum. Conversely, the people I know who do have notable gaits all come from something else and none of them (as far as I know) have autism.

Anecdata: My paternal side has some kind of innate preference for walking on your toes. I prefer it, my father's mother was well known to have done it, I have a couple cousins like that. While I can't speak for other family, I did go through a massive battery of aptitude and psych tests when I was young as part of the agonizing initiation into the curse of childhood giftedness. No autism.

I've become very concerned in the last few years how our society produces diagnoses that turn into self-inhibiting labels that restrict personal development. Developing ones-self, as much as you are able, is an ancient and treasured tradition. Modernity seems to be leading us to the reverse and to shackle ourselves with the weight of imposed limitations.
by iLemming | 2025-07-17 01:55:57+00:00
> I still prefer the emacs way of doing things

Emacs was always modal. Emacs is inherently a modal text editor - keychords are modal, transients are modal, isearch is modal, repeat-mode is modality. The only thing the idea of vim-navigation brings on top of all that is a simple, structured and memorable language/grammar to deal with modality, that's all what it is.

Both approaches are modal; Vi just codified its modality into a more learnable, linguistic system while Emacs distributed its modality across context-sensitive mini-languages.

Emacs has this same power scattered throughout - the kill-ring, rectangle operations, keyboard macros - but Vi's genius was packaging it into a coherent, immediately graspable system that feels less like using a computer and more like speaking a concise language about text.

The best thing about learning that language is that you can apply it anywhere where keyboard input is still relevant - your browser, your terminal, your entire system - e.g. you can control your music, jump between apps, navigate between windows, etc. using only the home row keys.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-07-17 01:56:07+00:00
> You assume that the ECC is not already calculated when the data is in the cache (and the cache line is marked dirty).

It was case on the systems I worked with. Integrating it between the cache and memory controller is a great idea though, and it makes sense where you've described it.

> If you do notice it, your cache hit rate is close to 0 and your CPU is effectively running around 50MHz due to pipeline stalls.

Where memory latency hurts for us is ISRs and context switches. The hit rate is temporarily very low, and as you mentioned the IPC suffers greatly.
by Loughla | 2025-07-17 01:58:25+00:00
Not accurate, even slightly. You might get hired as a gopher and spend 5 years trying to do other work if you just blunder in without training or skills.

Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices.

The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-17 01:58:59+00:00
For whatever reason I could never do that. We did it in school and something about the pressure made it impossible for me to read things smoothly even though, reading in my mind to myself things felt smooth. It's the same with typing. I suddenly can't type if someone standing over my shoulder watching me. It makes no sense. It could be my best friend but it doesn't matter. Suddently I can't type well.
by ajross | 2025-07-17 01:59:11+00:00
That's sort of a double standard, though. No, Debian et. al. aren't perfect and there are ways that serious bugs can and do make it through to production systems. But very, very few of them are malicious exploits. The xz-utils mess last year was a very notable, deliberate attack that took years of planning to get an almost undetectable exploit into a core Linux library.

And. It. Failed. Debian caught it.

So no. Not perfect. But pretty good, and I trust them and their track record. That's a very different environment than "Here guys, we'll send your code all over the world. But no Russian emails please. Thx."
by xet7 | 2025-07-17 01:59:52+00:00
> What Linux computer can you buy with the battery life, quietness, lack of heat and speed of a modern ARM based Mac?

M1 Air or M2 Air, running Asahi Linux. I am posting this using my M1 Air, running Fedora Asahi.

> As far as phones - your alternative is to buy an Android phone with an operating system by an ad company that is also pushing AI just as hard.

I use Fairphone 4 with Ubuntu Touch.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 02:02:18+00:00
No, no you can't. I don't know where this misconception comes from.

Trademarks are trademarks, regardless of technology. I can't open a store called McDonald's that isn't a McDonald's but I sell cheeseburgers. Simply... moving this online doesn't magically make laws disappear.

Tech people have a strange misconception that tech overrides laws. No, it doesn't. Calling it "disruption" doesn't count, either.

If bought googlesearch.org but it's my own search engine that's illegal. You can't do that. Even if I did g00glesearch.org that's still illegal.

Even if I don't use the Google name, but I use something similar, maybe with a similar font, that's still illegal. Because, obviously, the intent is to deceive consumers. You can't do that. You can't pretend to be a brand you're not.
by tomku | 2025-07-17 02:03:12+00:00
If you use Make as a task runner like in the article, please make sure that you're also declaring your tasks as .PHONY targets: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-Tar...

Otherwise, the existence of a file or folder with the same name as your task ("test", for example) will stop that task from being run, which might be very annoying if you're using the Makefile as part of a script or CI or something where you won't notice the "Nothing to be done for..." message.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-17 02:03:21+00:00
I wish it weren't such a big deal in ones life they keep their current employer (from the perspective of things like health insurance plans, retirement plans, PTO balances, basic income). If it weren't so god damned painful to change jobs or have some gaps longer than a month or two then maybe we'd have a chance to just treat jobs as jobs we move between instead of a sacred vow for life lest we be thrown into chaos when broken.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-17 02:04:15+00:00
> One big barrier I haven't seen mentioned is all the OEM competition they are going to face.

Not sure on this one. The company likely has it's own vision but I've thought for a while that a swarm of small electric rubber tracked earth moving vehicles (small enough to fit one or two in a tradies van?) could work longer hours due to being much quieter. For larger jobs you put a single person in a small tower on overwatch and run it 24 hours a day.

This'd give you a somewhat scalable approach from small residential jobs to somewhat larger jobs while not competing against the incumbents directly and allowing you to work out the kinks. Then if it makes sense later, you build bigger machines with hopefully better battery technology.

Ultimately though, for proper big jobs, you need proper big tools. Maybe a partnership or "exit strategy" works.

Though maybe I've played too many RTS games like Supreme Commander...
by fulmicoton | 2025-07-17 02:04:51+00:00
One trouble I could see with your approach is that you treat the information "Doc at pos i" beats "Doc at pos j" independently from i and j. Intuitively, it is not as critical when a bad doc is at rank 9 instead of rank 10; compared to bad doc landing at rank 1 instead of rank 10.

LambdaMART's approach seems better in that respect.

https://medium.com/@nikhilbd/pointwise-vs-pairwise-vs-listwi...
by rr808 | 2025-07-17 02:05:14+00:00
> New jobs will arise and there will be plenty of jobs to go around once the new growth cycle gets underway.

That is a gamble. Everyone talks about how the dotcom bust quickly recovered and housing bust recovered. But that period was when smart phones started, everyone got broadband and most businesses moved to the web. Can you be surely something else will come along?
by habinero | 2025-07-17 02:06:57+00:00
Yeah, basically. Nobody wanted to pay $12,000 to be in a plane for three hours when they could pay ~$1200 to be in one for six hours. Plus, they used up a lot of fuel. That made them real vulnerable to oil price spikes.

Contrast that with modern widebody jets, which fly ~300 people plus paid cargo on much more fuel-efficient engines.
by mooiedingen | 2025-07-17 02:07:09+00:00
To those that still believe that a bunch of data loaded into memory, where data can be anything from a scientific article to a message between two lovers, getting triggered for an output with input and a basic for loop can represent anything intelligence, i have some bad news for you like damn ya'll don't you know git(hub) & huggingface? Ofcourse the drawback of that is that you are not contributing to AGI KEK!
by zulko | 2025-07-17 02:07:53+00:00
When I was about 10 I picked my first ever CD at a music shop, and it was a recording of the Gershwin piano rolls, because the cover photo caught my eye [1]. I didn't really understand what I was listening to, I assumed "piano roll" was a musical genre, like "rock'n'roll", until years later when my English became good enough to read the CD's booklet.

It was also a time when all these midi files started being available, like the 6000 rolls from Terry Smythe [2], and I figured out transcribing these could be a good way to learn old-school Jazz, which is otherwise difficult to find as sheet music.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX9MCyO6smk

[2] https://archive.org/details/terrysmythe.ca-archive/mp3s/Ampi...
by zahlman | 2025-07-17 02:08:46+00:00
There's only one kind of Python virtual environment, and both uv and the standard library `venv` module make them (as does third-party support like `virtualenv`). The differences are in what gets put in them (aside from the actual packages you explicitly install), and in the interface for configuring that. In particular, the standard library defaults to bootstrapping pip, but you can easily skip that. And of course uv does not bootstrap pip, because it does pip's job (and much more).