MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by const_cast | 2025-07-15 19:42:20+00:00
I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable.

Closed-source software seems to get... stuck. In the best case. Often, they regress: becoming buggier from version to version with less features. I think of Windows and the entire Microsoft suite of applications.

I think one exception is Gnome. Gnome loves removing features more than they love not implementing popular Wayland protocols.
by homebrewer | 2025-07-15 19:42:21+00:00
Helix is the most interesting editor I've seen in a while. Very sane configuration — my config includes just one line to change the default theme to something with more contrast.

No "AI" shit pushed down your throat, and it takes the vim idea of applying actions to blocks of code, and swaps them around — you first select the code, and then apply an action to it. So you get visual feedback before doing the action and can clearly see what's going to be changed without having to spam visual mode all the time.

There was a decent article recently which explains some of the things I like in it also:

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/06/i-like-helix/
by zahlman | 2025-07-15 19:42:52+00:00
Exactly.

It's not supposed to be zero-sum — posting volume isn't limited, or at least I assume we're nowhere near what the servers can technically handle — but attention span is limited. Seeing a front page full of things you aren't interested in makes it harder to find the things you are interested in, and feels discouraging if you want to post one of those things (an unfortunate feedback loop).
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-15 19:42:58+00:00
In US english (at least as I speak/understand it) "shopping" is any act of browsing/looking at/selecting something for purchase. It can be groceries, clothes, a car, anything really and it can be online or in person at a store.

"I'm going shopping" with no other specifics would normally mean "for groceries" or other general household supplies, though.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-15 19:43:21+00:00
A streaming system has data inside of it at any time. For instance, if it is joining data together to do

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

it has data that is waiting to be joined with other data that hasn't been spit out yet.

You can process a batch by streaming it through a streaming system, but you can't just shut the system down at the end, you have to flush out all the stuff that is in flight, if you want to get the right answers. That is, a streaming system is a moving target and might not be entirely consistent at a single moment in time, and that's fine. If you call it a "batch" system the calculation has a definite beginning and end, that's the difference.

I built a hybrid system that used streaming ideas to solve batch problems and had to face this problem. Then I worked at a place that was developing a system a lot like the one I built except I knew what algebra mine supported and they refused to admit theirs had an algebra, and I had learned the hard way that I had to tear down the system carefully in the end to get correct answers and they would argue with me over whether that matters -- so of course their system never got the same answer twice but they were in such a hurry they didn't really care.

Customers did.
by tines | 2025-07-15 19:43:38+00:00
The difference is that LLMs are not like any other tool. Reasoning by analogy doesn't work when things are sufficiently in-analogous.

For example, people try to compare this LLM tech with the automation of the car manufacturing industry. That analogy is a terrible one, because machines build better cars and are much more reliable than humans.

LLMs don't build better software, they build bad software faster.

Also, as a tool, LLMs discourage understanding in a way that no other tool does.
by gjm11 | 2025-07-15 19:43:43+00:00
Ohh, I see, you mean "mass" should have been "mass and energy" rather than e.g. that (mass,volume) should have been replaced by (mass,energy) or something.

I confess I just ... take it for granted in this kind of context that "mass" or "energy" or "mass+energy" all mean the same thing. Someone who wants to refer just to the total amount of matter will say something like "the total mass of the matter in the universe".

It's commonplace for physicists to write just "mass" when talking about this sort of thing. E.g.,

P T Landsberg, "Mass scales and the cosmological coincidences", Annalen der Physik, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/andp.19844960203:

"Theories involving the parameters h, c, G, H (in a usual notation) are considered. A huge ratio of 10^120 of the mass of the universe (m_u) to the smallest determinable mass m_0 in the period since the big bang occurs in such theories."

(Not cherry-picked; I went to the Wikipedia article on "Black hole cosmology", noted that it just says "mass" rather than "mass-energy" or whatever, and followed the link in the attached footnote. Also, so far as I know, not crankery; Landsberg was an eminent physicist.)
by buu700 | 2025-07-15 19:44:28+00:00
Sure, but how so? If I'm understanding your argument correctly, it sounds like you may be implying that we should escalate the war on general-purpose computing and outlaw generative AI.

If we were to consider that, then to what end? If you accept my framing of the long-term implications of LLMs on the industry, then what you're suggesting is effectively that we should deprive society of greater prosperity for the benefit of a small minority. Personally, I'd rather improve democratization of entrepreneurship (among other things) than artificially prop up software engineering salaries.

And let's say the US did all that. What then? We neuter our economy and expect our adversaries to just follow suit? More likely it hobbles our ability to compete and ultimately ushers in an era of global hegemony under the CCP.
by glenstein | 2025-07-15 19:44:31+00:00
I apologize for getting your name wrong.

>This is completely wrong, since I was a founder of Mozilla from 1998 on, so I was there for growth from 0 for Mozilla Suite, then from 0 for Firefox, to the peak after Chrome was out. Did you think I just joined Mozilla in 2010?

This marks the first time I've ever heard someone argue that time period B didn't happen because it was preceded by time period A. I think claiming they both did indeed happen is a more coherent interpretation of historical events.

>Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception. Deal?

I actually love Mozilla and everything it's been able to achieve which is why I'm here pushing back against haters in the comment section. There's currently a mass hallucination happening at HN, where commenters are claiming that Mozilla's various side bets from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015. Someone motivated to point to your tenure as capable of reversing those losses would have to reconcile that with the fact that your tenure coincided with the biggest collapse in market share. My hope is not that they would endorse that interpretation, but that it would reveal the motivated reasoning of treating market share decline as reversible if only you had stayed.

I would argue the real largest single driver of market share loss was the emergence of Chromium, and Google's flexing of unparalleled leverage to push Chromium out to everyone combined with Embrace-Extend-Extinguish battle plan on web standards. Excluding that from the story, and trying to framing it entirely in terms of Mozilla missteps is unfair to Mozilla, and is what I'm pushing back against.
by librasteve | 2025-07-15 19:44:41+00:00
I stand corrected on that - I was responding to the headline and did not appreciate that Rust has had library support beforehand. (That said, having regex around in different standard vs. crate options is not necessarily the ideal).

It's good to have a focus and I agree that Rust is all about performance and stability for a system language.

I haven't seen Raku regex performance benchmarked, but I would be surprised if it beats perl or Rust.

I wouldn't say that Raku is a good choice where speed is the most important consideration since it is a scripting language that runs on a VM with GC. Nevertheless the language syntax includes many features (hyper operators, lazy evaluation to name two) that make it amenable to performance optimisation.
by tfourb | 2025-07-15 19:45:51+00:00
We are talking about a status quo scenario, in which CO2 emissions are continuing unabated along current levels or falling only very slowly. This will result in an increase of average global temperatures of +3°C [0]. It will literally make uninhabitable due to flooding or heat a non-insignificant share of currently settled land area around the world.

If you want to really kill your appetite, google "wet bulb temperature" and think about the (very real) possibility, that a mega-city in pakistan or india could experience a wet bulb temperature of >35°C for several hours sometimes this century, which will probably kill most people who don't have access to air conditioning (which is most of them), while the excessive use of air conditioning will further increase the temperature in this city during the event.

If we are talking about +3°C scenarios, it is really for you to argue why excess deaths shouldn't be assumed to show compounding growth.

> Have you considered mitigating factors to prevent deaths?

I've mentioned the possibility of adaption several times in this thread. But I personally severely doubt that a global society that can't get it's act together to limit CO2 emissions will be able to mobilize adequate economic and political resources to make a dent in the excess deaths resulting from a +3°C scenario. It's the same basic problem: we would need to mobilize considerable public resources, financed mostly by rich people and with significant impact on the lifestyle of the middle class to benefit society at large. Either we manage to achieve this for both emission reduction and adaption, or we will loose at both.

[0] https://www.ngfs.net/ngfs-scenarios-portal/explore
by busterarm | 2025-07-15 19:45:51+00:00
I will agree with you up to a point. Some cinema-going experiences are without parallel.

I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.

The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.

The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-15 19:45:55+00:00
This is my watershed for true AGI. It should be able to create a smarter version of itself.

Last I checked, feeding the output of an LLM back into its training data leads to a progressively worse LLM. (Note I'm not talking about distillation, which involves training a smaller model, by sacrificing accuracy. I'm referring to an equal or greater number of model parameters)
by dylan604 | 2025-07-15 19:46:23+00:00
The thing that attracts me to a theater is the sound system that I'll never have at home. However, on the last couple of ventures to the theater, the sound was too loud. I don't think it was the mix of the audio, but just the theater's volume knob turned to an 11. Would it have been different if the theater was full vs the half empty? I doubt it. It was just too loud. I no longer return to that specific theater
by OgsyedIE | 2025-07-15 19:46:24+00:00
It is tragically the case that most of the archives of fractalforums are irretrievable and lost media. The archive.org copies are very incomplete and the database dumps, as far as my research last year could figure out, are locked behind a group of moderators of an inadequately programmed successor site who don't want to share them, considering the dumps to be a status moat for themselves.
by zahlman | 2025-07-15 19:47:11+00:00
> as long as the AI/LLM posts are not dumbed down mainstream content

The problem is, most of it really is (as it boils down to "I am / $COMPANY is using an LLM to do something; here's how you can do it too, and / or some pundit's opinion of the implications for the industry"). And the stuff that wouldn't be (like how they work, or statistics and benchmarks), often requires relatively specific domain knowledge to really appreciate.
by fragmede | 2025-07-15 19:47:14+00:00
Externally there's no rigorous definition as to what constitutes AGI, so I'd guess internally it's not one monolithic thing they're targeting either. You'd need everyone to take a class about the nature of intelligence first, and all the different kinds of it just to begin with. There's undoubtedly dissent internally as to the best way to achieve chosen milestones on the way there, as well as disagreement that those are the right milestones to begin with. Think tactical disagreement, not strategic. If you didn't think that AGI were ever possible with LLMs, would you even be there to begin with?
by naasking | 2025-07-15 19:47:16+00:00
> https://github.com/koka-lang/libhandle

Dropped the r somehow:

https://github.com/koka-lang/libhandler

> Sure, if everything has to be able to "wait" for the result of a continuation then you're forcing async support on everything.

If "forcing async support" doesn't mean that code has to change, or any other code in the call chain, then it's just meaningless pedantry.
by evantbyrne | 2025-07-15 19:47:19+00:00
Before that quoted sentence you drew a line from the reformation to people believing that AI is inevitable, then went on to imply these people may even believe such a thing will happen without the involvement of people. These are generalizations which don't fit a lot of the literature and make their best ideas look a bit sillier than they are. It is situations like these that make me think that analogies are better suited as a debate tactic than a method of study.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-07-15 19:47:30+00:00
I used to work for such org, I'm 99.42% sure they don't use those features.

That situation arise when the person responsible for approving contracts doesn't understant jack and takes the most expensive one so that if any problem arise, it's not their fault.

The EU is where I found the strongest "Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM" mindset.

And Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and the others know it.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-15 19:48:02+00:00
Yeah this has been the worst development in HN culture as HN has grown in my experience. To make things worse the extremity of the hype and pessimism just creates a huge flamewar where each side is dedicated to using the worst strawmen to undermine the other side.

Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry. Increasingly I see folks refer to the content here in the same breath as Reddit so I don't think I'm the only one.

It's probably just a scale problem. When a website becomes big enough it becomes dominated by the folks with the most time to post and the most passionate opinions.
by tristor | 2025-07-15 19:48:31+00:00
I use JPEG XL / JXL all of the time, the fact it was "killed off" is news to me. I also use Firefox and not Chrome, so maybe that has something to do with it. If Google decides they want to divide the web by being stupid and failing to follow standards, we have very little path to change that, but it certainly does not create any form of consensus or resolute outcome. Google removing JPEG XL from Chrome because they want to force everyone to use a much worse standard they control (webp) doesn't mean anything about the future of JPEG XL.
by tines | 2025-07-15 19:49:05+00:00
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-15 19:49:17+00:00
> True, but MPs receiving a few mails that say “this law has affected me in this way” is IMO far more likely to be effective than a petition with 100k signatures that says “I don’t like this law which you recently approved”.

I think they are both ineffective. So I don't believe that is true.

> MPs have been known to respond to letters. I have had responses to various issues.

Getting a response is one thing. Having something done is another.

> It obviously depends on the MP. Many MPs were very much opposed to this issue.

The legislation was going to happen at some point or another. The direction of travel was quite clear. There are always going to be some dissenters, but the awful legislation got passed anyway. So what did their dissent achieve? Nothing.

I came to the realisation a number of years ago that for the majority of people, the only care about being able to use their Netflix, shopping on amazon, check their email and post photos on Facebook. Concerns outside of that are simply too abstract/distant to care about.
by palmotea | 2025-07-15 19:49:21+00:00
> Remember: the people who work for these shareholders - most of which are institutional investors, not individuals - went to exclusive schools and make more in bonuses than you will in a lifetime of work, at least if you're the average American.

So? What's your point? We should root for Zuckerberg because the people who are suing him are rich? Zuckerberg is an order of magnitude worse in all those resentment metrics you list than the people who are suing him.
by simonw | 2025-07-15 19:49:29+00:00
I want this solved so much - across all of the operating systems I use.

Ideally I'd like to never run code I download from the internet outside of a sandbox ever again.

Case in point, just yesterday: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malicious-vsc... - "Malicious VSCode extension in Cursor IDE led to $500K crypto theft" - because the Open VSX alternative to the VS Code marketplace has unreviewed extensions and they don't have a sandbox to stop them from doing anything they like.
by lesinski | 2025-07-15 19:49:52+00:00
I am a party magician in my spare time -- I walk around parties and show short bits of eye-catching magic to guests.

I have noticed that some young people (~18-30 yo) lose attention within as little as 5 seconds. I could have someone choose a card and in that amount of time, they have spaced out -- no phone, just staring blankly. I have two rubber bands examined and by the time they are handed back, someone is on their phone.

The most annoying part is that -- because I construct my routines for minimal attention spans -- within 2 more seconds, something magic happens and everyone who's paying attention reacts. And the 1-2 young people who zoned out start panicking about the FOMO, "what happened?" "do it again!" Sorry folks!
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-15 19:50:05+00:00
> I'd actually turn that around and ask you the very same question. You know that Palestinians in the West Bank have no rights whatsoever, and I don't understand what you're playing at with your obvious gambit here.

They absolutely have rights. For example, they can marry, they can buy things, go to work, sell things, they have a lot of rights. So, stop lying.

> The PA is just as powerless as the Warsaw Judenrat was.

I’m sure the Jews in Warsaw ghetto got their tax revenue and used it to fund martyrs fund to kill innocent polish civilians. Quite a novel discovery about the history of Warsaw Ghetto!

> I never said anything of the sort. The Jews of the Arab world were treated horribly after the founding of Israel. They suffered because of what people they had no control over (European and American Zionists) did.

Another novel historical take: Jews lived peacefully in Muslim lands for generations! It’s all fault of some other Jews thousands of miles away that Jews of Iraq were attacked by Arabs. It was not the decision of the Arabs in Iraq to attack their fellow countrymen, it was… hm…

So, you would be totally fine to attack ethnic group X in america if the same ethnic group somewhere else does something you may disagree with? Gotcha!

> It directly contradicts your claim that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza was an attempt to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. You're just changing the subject now.

No it doesn’t. The same time Israel disengaged with Gaza it also cleaned up and removed numerous settlements in the West Bank. For example, a couple of them were near Nablus. Which kinda makes it illogical — how can one focus on settling West Bank if the actions are quite the opposite?

However, it’s going to be a third novel historical tale by you, so everything tracks.

> The "So what?" is that this undermines your claim that Israel is willing to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. They only traded land for peace with Egypt because Egypt was a credible military threat (which the Palestinians are not).

See above. Perhaps you should read more on the subject, but not Wikipedia.

> I'm Jewish.

Of course you are.

> But this is how every conversation with a Zionist ends, in my experience. After they pull out all the talking points they learned at summer camp, they fall back to their last line of defense: "You just hate Jews." Or its cousin: "You're just a self-hating Jew." As if loving oneself requires one to support a little ultranationalist state on the other side of the world that's currently carrying out a genocide.

Talking points? Man, you make up history as we speak. Make factually incorrect claims. And I’m the one with talking points?

Your values are not universal, they are conditioned on who is the subject, you apply different standards to Israelis and Palestinians, and you telling me about “zionists” and talking points? Hilarious.

Every claim you make is not rooted in reality, and shows just surface level understanding of what is going on.
by busterarm | 2025-07-15 19:50:10+00:00
Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.

The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.

How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)

That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.