MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vkou | 2025-07-12 04:35:07+00:00
Kerr county didn't balk at the cost of flood sirens. Biden sent them 10 million dollars for this exact purpose, and they refused to spend it, because it would have let the federal Democrats do something useful for their constituents. [1]

> "Accepting the ARPA money and putting our County under existing and future executive orders would federalize us and make us all slaves."

These people are certifiably insane.

The 10 million did eventually get spent on new police radios and bonuses for the sheriff's department. [2]

[1] https://www.chron.com/news/article/kerr-county-flood-funds-2...

[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-kerr-county-co...
by 9rx | 2025-07-12 04:35:54+00:00
> Your example isn't syntactically valid in Golang.

Well, of course not. Hnlang is clearly not the same language as Go. The different name tips you off to that. However, the same intent can be expressed as a Go statement:

var x int

For what it is worth, the silly pedantry you offer is as funny as you had hoped it would be, so kudos. But it is telling that you had to reach for being funny to mask your cluelessness. Better than being one of those idiots that doubles down on their idiocy once they realize that they have no idea what is going on, I suppose!
by zarzavat | 2025-07-12 04:36:40+00:00
Yes, but for most of human history we didn't have contraception either. People had children because it was either that or abstinence, and abstinence sucks. Not to mention the need to create heirs who could look after you when you became too old to work.

In an advanced society where the threat is depopulation rather than invasion, xenophobia is harmful unless you can find a way to convince people to have more children than is rational for them to have.
by eternityforest | 2025-07-12 04:38:16+00:00
In a perfect world this stuff would all be standardized and modular, with documented replacement parts.

Nearly all random consumer items could be done with about 15 different PCBs, total, with a dollar or two of extra cost from unused features.

A fan and a frother and a keyboard cleaning blower are all just USB chargers with a BLDC driver.

A microwave and a washing machine can share the same controller, people probably won't complain too much about the extra cost if they understand that it means the board will always be replaceable, even 50 years from now.

They could even run some kind of bytecode VM that they just don't change, so the same firmware still works in different CPUs.

Everything could be open, optionally smarthome integrated with a firmware update, and swappable like IBM PC parts.

It doesn't appear to be the kind of things businesses do, but from a technical and consumer perspective it seems totally feasible.
by Webstir | 2025-07-12 04:41:34+00:00
Not at all. I'm an attorney. Fast law is bad law. If you're using LLMs (stop calling it AI ffs -- only morons parrot the marketing hype) to do law, you're just asking toget slapped sooner or later. Like the moron that is My Pillow Mike Lindell's lawyer. See here: https://ia801706.us.archive.org/34/items/gov.uscourts.cod.21...
by pillefitz | 2025-07-12 04:41:40+00:00
LLMs have more knowledge than you'll ever have, while being somewhat worse at reasoning. A friend of mine suffers from severe depression and after trying 5 medications, decades of therapy with different therapists, LLMs are the only thing that give him the feeling of being listened to. Funnily enough, he had therapists berating him in a quiet similar tone as evident in your post, while only getting empathetic and level-headed responses from chatGPT, which have helped him tremendously since.
by mcny | 2025-07-12 04:42:11+00:00
For students to learn effectively, they need a safe harbor. The most critical offering for learners on AWS is a free or prepaid account tier that completely eliminates the risk of surprise bills, allowing them to focus purely on their education.

If the free forever portion includes a t4g.small, 1 aurora, a 10 GB S3 bucket, that would be perfect.

I am not holding my breath though.
by ryukoposting | 2025-07-12 04:43:30+00:00
To be fair, hard drive noises come in many registers (heh). The Maxtor drive in my 1995 HP Vectra sounds much higher than the drive in that video. The drive in my 1998 Compaq laptop is even higher than that.

Granted, the most distinctive noise of the Vectra's boot sequence is the moaning of the floppy drives, not the hard drive.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-12 04:45:32+00:00
When a state like Texas is so gerrymandered that no political competition is really possible, and ignorance is celebrated, why would be surprised that ignorant people elect stupid people to govern them?

I’m sure that they claim to “back the blue” while refusing to put the communications tools that keep them safe in place as well.

What people of this ilk have done to our nation makes me sick.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-12 04:47:08+00:00
NATS has a bit more in terms of durability guarantees so I have found that it hits more use cases. I'm trying to strike a bit of a balance between "use the exact right tool for the job, even if that means you have 25 different services" and "just use Postgres". I do think Postgres/Redis/ClickHouse is probably fine as well but durable streaming would be hard to give up.
by esperent | 2025-07-12 04:48:54+00:00
I've opened up my MSI laptop a bunch of times - upgrading RAM, SSD, repasting, cleaning the fans. Maybe six or seven times over four years. Repasting in particular involves removing a lot of cables and screws, then lifting of the large heatsink.

I've never had any feeling that anything is going to break. Certainly not any of the cables or connectors.

I had worked on desktop computers before, but never done anything more complex than changing RAM on a laptop.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-12 04:49:37+00:00
Claude Code with a Claude subscription is the cheap version for current SOTA.

"Agentic" workflows burn through tokens like there's no tomorrow, and the new Opus model is so expensive per-token that the Max plan pays itself back in one or two days of moderate usage. When people reports their Claude Code sessions costing $100+ per day, I read that as the API price equivalent - it makes no sense to actually "pay as you go" with Claude right now.

This is arguably the cheapest option available on the market right now in terms of results per dollar, but only if you can afford the subscription itself. There's also time/value component here: on Max x5, it's quite easy to hit the usage limits of Opus (fortunately the limit is per 5 hours or so); Max x20 is only twice the price of Max x5 but gives you 4x more Opus; better model = less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI. It's expensive to be poor, unfortunately.
Show HN: EdgeLLM – 3 offline LLMs for iOS in one SwiftPM line
by mlboy | 2025-07-12 04:51:24+00:00
EdgeLLM is a Swift Package that embeds Qwen‑0.6 B, Gemma‑2 B and Phi‑3.5‑Mini into a single 300 MB XCFramework. One line in Package.swift, no runtime download, works in Airplane Mode. Benchmarks: 32/18/15 tok/s on iPhone 15 Pro. Apache‑2.0, BYOM supported. Roadmap includes 10 MB runtime + Android. Happy to answer questions!
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-07-12 04:51:59+00:00
Quite nostalgic about that floppy disk "check disk" boot sound.

I know it's a yelling at cloud position to take, but it really does feel like we lost a lot of the human connection to machines when we ditched that kind of physical media. Switches that physically actuated the eject mechanism, clicks, clunks, scrapes, covers and slides. It all felt real and you could weirdly build a relationship with the object, hear it struggle and whine or working away. You could snap a floppy disk in anger or fawn over it in hopes of repair or recovery. You could maybe stomp on a USB stick but you'd probably need a hammer.

Obviously it was all slow, somewhat prone to breaking or gumming up, etc. There's a reason we moved past it but the most my computer (the thinky bit of it) feels like it exists now are its fans and they're no fun really.

I can't abstract myself from the reaction to Alien & Starwars set design where everything feels very tactile. Maybe I like that because I'm old, maybe Gen++ also thinks its neat.

I'm replacing the old fluro lights in my shed, that have been in there since it was my dads shed, some are probably 20 years old and I realised how much I like the "burrr ping ping tick ting PING". The space speaks to me when I enter, hello how are you lets do something. The LEDs just turn on, bang, light.
by EspadaV9 | 2025-07-12 04:52:20+00:00
Looks like he didn't get time to finish

https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/pics/2025/03/25/fa...

Terry Pratchett has one I'd like to think he'd approve of. Just a shame I'm unable to see the 8th colour, I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/pics/2025/03/25/fa...
by iainctduncan | 2025-07-12 04:52:37+00:00
I personally do not use LLMs (knowingly) at all, largely for environmental reasons. The improvements are, to me, not worth the attrocious energy use. I will happily pay 20% or whatever more in both money and time.

I also have no interest in technology that impedes my skill development. I do not want to use anything that makes me a worse writer over time.

YMMV, I am answering the OP not evangelizing. Counter arguments will be ignored.
by mbastos | 2025-07-12 04:53:09+00:00
We all talk about “moving fast” and “shipping features,” but who picks up the tab for those shortcuts? In Part 2 of our series on Technical Debt vs. Technical Assets, we tackle the pushback head-on: • Why the true “lender” is your future self—and every developer (and stakeholder) who follows • How calling it “debt” sparks the urgency executives and engineers need to act • Why every asset carries upkeep costs—and how to keep your investments healthy

If you’ve ever wondered how to make smarter trade-offs between shipping now and scaling later, this one’s for you.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-12 04:53:30+00:00
Yep, you can pick up a 4TB usb-c SSD for a few hundred dollars/euros. Unless you are moving around 10s/100s of GB routinely, it's not going to be horribly slow. I had a 2TB Samsung taped to my imac for a few years when its fusion drive failed. The 64GB SSD still worked. So I used that for the OS. And the Samsung for the rest. I had Steam installed and X-plane and a few other things. Worked great. This was the 2015 5K imac. Eventually the motherboard died. I still have the SSD.

I've considered getting a mac mini with decently specced CPU/GPU and plenty of RAM and then just attaching a big SSD via thunderbolt. Probably a lot cheaper than maxing out the internal SSD and I don't think it will be that horrible. My main use case would be dealing with photos, maybe X-plane, and some videos. I might buy some games as well but it's not my core use case. It seems the Apple store is slowly filling up with a decent selection of ported games. I gladly pay the Apple tax to never deal with Windows again. I actually have a linux laptop running Steam. The hardware is just really crap and I keep longing for my macbook whenever I have to use it. Actually typing on this thing right now as I'm traveling and I left my work M4 Max mac book at home (it's a bit of a beast to lug around on vacation). The mini would probably be hooked up to a TV so I can watch stuff via Firefox and use a sane ad blocker and UI rather than dealing with whatever crap tastic shit comes with modern smart TVs.

So a reasonably beefy mac mini would basically be my entertainment center and double as a home PC with a ginormous 4K screen. I have considered getting some AMD equivalent with Arch Linux. Still on the fence about that. But either way, external USB-C for storage seems fine.
by thesuavefactor | 2025-07-12 04:55:12+00:00
It's not about performance, it's about load time and the restrictions of your client apps.

Also, you're thinking way too much in a SPA architecture. Using just server side rendering with just a tiny bit of javascript like the article states removes most of the problems you describe like Initial load time and cross team collaboration. The load time of the described websites would be instant, and there is no front end team needed.
by dlcarrier | 2025-07-12 04:55:21+00:00
It makes no sense for nonvolatile storage, where the power consumption, bandwidth limit, and latency of socketed interconnects are trivial, compared to the speed, latency, and power consumption of the drive itself.

For RAM, it's an entirely different ball game. The closer you can have it to the processor die, the higher the bandwidth, the lower the latency, and the lower the power consumption.
by lxgr | 2025-07-12 04:56:25+00:00
Most airplanes regularly crossing oceans already do have satcom.

The cost of hardware and additional fuel consumption due to drag aren’t nothing, but the data used itself is essentially a rounding error. (Iridium for example has tiny antennas, and SBD data costs about a dollar per kilobyte, and position data is tiny.)

Of course, that’s all little help when a pilot acts adversarial; on MH370, the breakers for both satcom and transponder were likely pulled, for example.
by maeil | 2025-07-12 04:57:36+00:00
(I'm the person you're replying to, in case you might get confused)

It's very unfortunate that all I received was downvotes, without a single substantial reply as to what would be particularly incorrect about the observations I made. This does indeed seem to stem from infallibility tribalism: "I identify with group A, so literally anything that can be taken as pointing out a flaw of group A is an attack on me as a person".

At the same time, this isn't a particular hallmark of the left; it's even worse on the right. In any right-dominated space, my comment, if the roles were swapped, would simply have been instantly removed rather than just being downvoted. r/conservative is a very prime example. Twitter is another one, having become much more eager to instantly abide by requests from foreign autocratic regimes to remove/ban accounts that oppose them after the Musk takeover.

I do wonder if you're going to downvote me for this comment, reaching a new "irony level" world record :)
by GhostPixel89 | 2025-07-12 04:58:35+00:00
[Edit for format] Selectively using per capita rate ignores density, misleading for street-walking risks where per mile metrics show higher danger:

City Homicides (2024) Street Miles Homicides per street mile Chicago 573 4000 0.143 Philadelphia 246 2500 0.098 NYC 377 6000 0.063 Dallas 220 3900 0.056 Houston 322 6000 0.054 Los Angeles 260 6500 0.040 San Antonio 160 4000 0.040 Phoenix 190 5000 0.038 Jacksonville 140 3900 0.036 San Diego 35 2800 0.013 US Total - - 0.0046 US Rural - - 0.0006
by moralestapia | 2025-07-12 04:59:13+00:00
>ignoring the costs of facilities, salaries, non-cloud hardware, etc.

If you lease, those costs are amortized. It was definitely more than $5M, but I don't think it was as high as $100M. All things considered, I still believe Deepseek was trained at one (perhaps two) orders of magnitude lower cost than other competing models.
by benreesman | 2025-07-12 04:59:18+00:00
I find it's actually a good guideline for what to work on. If I'm 1, 3, 6, 12 months into a job or some other project and I can't remember what I was doing X months ago it tends to mean that I'm not improving during that period of time either.

Carmack is always trying to get better, do more, push the envelope further. He was never in it for money or fame, he was in it to be the best near as I can tell. And he's still among the truly terrifying hackers you wouldn't want to be up against, he just never stopped. You get that with a lot of the people I admire and try to emulate as best I can, Thompson comes to mind, Lamport, bunch of people. They just keep getting more badass from meeting their passion to the grave, a lifelong project of unbounded commitment to excellence in their craft.

That's who I look up to.
by milofeynman | 2025-07-12 04:59:22+00:00
Using cline for a bit made me realize cursor was doomed. Everything is just a gpt/anthropic wrapper of fancy prompts.

I can do most of what I want with cline, and I've gone back from large changes to just small changes and been moving much quicker. Large refactors/changes start to deviate from what you actually want to accomplish unless you have written a dissertation, and even then they fail.
by klauserc | 2025-07-12 04:59:37+00:00
Using gen AI for anything artistic (illustrations, music, video, creative writing) is a dead end. The results are soulless and bland. People notice immediately.

Code completions are fine. Driving code through chat is a complete waste of time (never saves time for me; always ends up taking longer). Agentic coding (where the LLM works autonomously for half an hour) still holds some promise, but my employer isn't ready for that.

Research/queries only for very low stakes/established things (e.g., how do I achieve X in git).
Show HN: OS Yamato – A gentle digital OS inspired by wabi-sabi
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-07-12 04:59:55+00:00
Hi everyone!

I'm excited to share OS Yamato, a minimalist experimental operating system I've been developing solo over the past 3 months, inspired by the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi (simplicity, impermanence, quiet beauty).

Unlike typical operating systems that focus on endless storage and engagement, OS Yamato is designed as a "digital garden" — data blooms and fades, and everything eventually returns to the wind if left untouched (auto-deletes after 365 days).

Key concepts - Data fades if left untouched (notes, photos, contacts, chats) - Seasonal and poetic animations for each interaction - No ads, no infinite scroll — designed to let you breathe

Tech stack - Frontend: Vue 3 + Vite - Backend: AWS Amplify (Cognito, AppSync, DynamoDB, S3)

Anyone can try it directly Website (live demo): https://hanaco875.com

I’m also continuously adding features (like ad-free AI search). I’d love feedback or thoughts from fellow builders and wanderers!

Thanks for reading!
by fastball | 2025-07-12 05:01:18+00:00
I'm seeing those numbers, but as the low end (without storage) for solar and at the high end for nuclear... so not a reasonable comparison. Not sure where you're looking, but from here your numbers are way off base.

To be more concrete: the first chart from this report[1] is showing "Solar PV + Storage—Utility" at $50-130 (mid-range: $90) and "U.S. Nuclear" at $141-220 (mid-range: $180).

I don't think we've had serious capitalized work on micro-reactors for 3 decades, it's a much more recent phenomenon. And China (who is massively outperforming the US in solar deployment) is also deploying Thorium reactors. Kinda strange for them to do that since they're so good at solar and nuclear is such a lost cause, esp since Thorium reactors are generally worse for the military/weapons case (which you claim is the only reason nuclear energy programs exist).

[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
by osigurdson | 2025-07-12 05:02:00+00:00
Its possible but of course slow because of https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832. Data locality matters a lot. Moving data around the network when it doesn't really need to be moved is heresy (unless performance doesn't matter, then who cares). Remember the computer doesn't care about your religion which says only this can do this and only that can do that.
Show HN: Built Podflyy.com, a NoteBookLM Alternative
by alexreysa | 2025-07-12 05:02:15+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Alejandro. For the past year, I've been building [PodFlyy.com](https://podflyy.com), an audio-focused alternative to Google's NotebookLM with simplicity, speed, and a better learning experience at its core.

I started PodFlyy long before NotebookLM was a thing, but now I'm hitting some tough realities. API costs, especially for text-to-speech, have grown significantly. Being an iOS app, I won't get paid until after Apple's 45-day payout period, creating a large cash flow gap. I've bootstrapped up to this point and currently have zero budget left.

My original vision was to empower anyone to instantly create audio content they'd love to listen to themselves, without setup or friction. Along the way, though, I've added several education-focused features like mindmaps, quizzes, and synchronized transcripts, which now complicate how I position the app clearly.

Here's what's unique about Podflyy at this point:

1. Single voice hosting No awkward multi-character interactions. Similar to a clear, natural audiobook or solo podcast.

2. Very fast audio generation Generates up to 60 minutes of content in roughly 60 seconds.

3. Zero setup required Just tell PodFlyy what you want to learn about, and it takes care of the rest. No need to upload or input documents.

4. Designed for effective learning Episodes include quizzes, mindmaps, and (soon) personalized audio tutors to help information retention.

5. Community-powered content discovery Episodes are categorized and searchable through a public community library, making it easy to discover topics others are exploring.

6. Visual storytelling Automatically generated visuals to supplement audio episodes, ideal for visual learners and easy content sharing.

7. Multilingual at its core The entire content creation process is natively multilingual. Ask something in Spanish, and PodFlyy researches, plans, and produces it entirely in Spanish. Same goes for French, German, Portuguese, and others.

8. Word-level synchronized audio transcripts (initially built for language learners) Text syncs word-by-word with audio playback, making pronunciation practice and learning new languages easier.

Despite all this progress, I'm currently feeling overwhelmed and unsure about next steps. I'd appreciate the community's candid perspective:

- Am I onto something promising here, or am I missing the mark? I feel strongly about PodFlyy's potential, but I struggle to effectively position and communicate it.

- How can I best overcome the cash flow challenge? Should I consider actively seeking investment, or continue bootstrapping somehow?

- Am I just losing time by trying to compete against NotebookLM? Google can afford to offer their version for free—I can't directly compete on pricing for long.

- Should I simplify messaging and fully embrace the education angle, given the educational features I've built (quizzes, mindmaps, language support)? Or should I stick closer to the original vision of user-created, instant audio storytelling?

Honest insights and advice would be massively helpful. Thank you!
by mcny | 2025-07-12 05:03:24+00:00
Everyone I talk to remembers it differently than I do but I absolutely hated floppies. Probably because I used them even as late as 2003 but I remember floppies as very unreliable with CRC-32 or whatever that could happen every time inserted it into the computer.

My use case? Sneaker net -- copying documents between my computer at home and the computer at an Internet cafe. I would ride my bicycle to the cyber cafe, download these PDF or plain text and read them on my computer at home. Kind of scary how little I actually remember but that's a different topic.
by geocrasher | 2025-07-12 05:03:52+00:00
Yes, but does it make that magical spool-up sound of a 5MB ST-506 trying to sound like a jet turbine?

ST-506 startup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7ImJwSmjzs

T-53 startup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNe9T1FRhwg

Tell me those aren't the best sounds ever.