MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-22 16:17:09+00:00
This startup is probably just a web server though. Let’s not pretend that multi cloud doesn’t have administration cost, network latency when using one cloud your data can literally be on the same server rack as your compute if you need it to be at best or at worse be in the same data center.

That also begs the question if you need the cheapest costs possible, wouldn’t you be better off at a colo and have your processing and data in the same data center and not have to spend extra on cloud costs?
Show HN: Wplacepixel.run – Browser pixel art generator for Wplace
by TheraDeng | 2025-08-22 16:17:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched wplacepixel.run, a browser-based pixel art generator for the Wplace community. It converts images into pixel art using the official 63-color Wplace palette and provides real-time stats like pixel count and color usage.

All processing happens client-side in the browser—no uploads or server required.

Curious what people think about in-browser pixel art generation: performance trade-offs, color quantization approaches, or other optimizations you’d do.
by morninglight | 2025-08-22 16:17:15+00:00
ValiDrive was designed to be fast and nondestructive -

In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.

For in-depth analysis, Gibson's "SpinRite" can be used -

The two programs are complimentary but very different. ValiDrive quickly checks for the presence of any storage at 576 locations across a drive's storage media. SpinRite thoroughly, deeply and fully examines, verifies, and exercises any drive's storage media, while also performing comprehensive data recovery if necessary.

So, ValiDrive is a “quickie” test to see whether any storage is present, whereas SpinRite is the heavy hitter that verifies every byte of a drive's storage to verify its integrity and reliability.

SpinRite is a data professional's tool at a hobbyist price - inexpensive, but not free.

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Validrive is less than 100K bytes! You could download and test it in 10 minutes. That should answer any questions you may have.
by TheDong | 2025-08-22 16:17:21+00:00
I agree with your point, but you'll have to update your example of something go can't do

> having to write a for loop to get the list of keys of a map

We now have the stdlib "maps" package, you can do:

keys := slices.Collect(maps.Keys(someMap))

With the wonder of generics, it's finally possible to implement that.

Now if only Go was consistent about methods vs functions, maybe then we could have "keys := someMap.Keys()" instead of it being a weird mix like `http.Request.Headers.Set("key", "value")` but `map["key"] = "value"`

Or 'close(chan x)' but 'file.Close()', etc etc.
by pxc | 2025-08-22 16:17:37+00:00
For programming, at least, there are also problems with overall output quality, instruction following, and the scopes of changes.

LLMs don't do well at following style instructions, and existing memory systems aren't adequate for "remembering" my style preferences.

When you ask for one change, you often get loads of other changes alongside it. Transformers suck at targeted edits.

The hallucination problem and the sycophancy/suggestibility problem (which perhaps both play into the phenomenon of being "confidently wrong") are both real and serious. But they hardly form a singular bottleneck for the usefulness of LLMs.
by whistle650 | 2025-08-22 16:17:51+00:00
It seems they use 70% of the benchmark query-answer pairs to cluster and determine which models work best for each cluster (by sending all queries to all models and looking at responses vs ground truth answers). Then they route the remaining 30% "test" set queries according to those prior determinations. It doesn't seem surprising that this approach would give you Pareto efficiency on those benchmarks.
by simianwords | 2025-08-22 16:17:52+00:00
>The Gemini IMO result used a specifically fine tuned model for math.

This is false.

https://x.com/YiTayML/status/1947350087941951596

This is false even for the OpenAI model

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1946478250974200272

"Typically for these AI results, like in Go/Dota/Poker/Diplomacy, researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain and does little else. But this isn’t an IMO-specific model. It’s a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general-purpose techniques."
by stouset | 2025-08-22 16:18:03+00:00
> validation generally happens when

Except when it doesn’t and then you have to deal with fucking Cthulhu because everyone thought they could just make incorrect assumptions that aren’t actually enforced anywhere because “oh that never happens”.

That isn’t engineering. It’s programming by coincidence.

> Maybe Rust will finish figuring out the OsString interface

The entire reason OsString is painful to use is because those problems exist and are real. Golang drops them on the floor and forces you pick up the mess on the random day when an unlucky end user loses data. Rust forces you to confront them, as unfortunate as they are. It's painful once, and then the problem is solved for the indefinite future.

Rust also provides OsStrExt if you don’t care about portability, which greatly removes many of these issues.

I don’t know how that’s not ideal: mistakes are hard, but you can opt into better ergonomics if you don’t need the portability. If you end up needing portability later, the compiler will tell you that you can’t use the shortcuts you opted into.
by unzadunza | 2025-08-22 16:18:18+00:00
> 81% of developers agreed that AI increases their productivity

I've had a few AI generated PRs come my way and the code-review process is, shall we say, not fun. It takes me a lot more time to review these PRs, there is way more back-and-forth between me and the 'developer', and it takes much more time to get the PR merged. That's not saying anything about the increased difficulty in modifying this code in the future.

I have a feeling these claims of being more productive don't account for the entire development cycle.
by cutemonster | 2025-08-22 16:18:35+00:00
That's a good point.

Maybe you can have all quiet and focused students together in the same classroom?

They might be reading different books, different speed, and have different questions to the teachers. But when they focus and don't interrupt each other, that can be fine?

Noisy students who sabotage for everyone shouldn't be there though.

Grouping students on some combination of learning speed and ability to focus / not disturbing the others. Rather than only learning speed. Might depend on the size of the school (how many students)
by NalNezumi | 2025-08-22 16:18:46+00:00
Sure! as far as I know, it's somewhat standardized and the east asian countries all have it (Korea, China, Japan). I know this because the Chinese Saturday School was close by. It's usually sponsored by the embassy & in the capital cities, or places with many Japanese families. (London, Germany, Canada afaik)

Because it's only once a week, it was from 09:00 - 14:00 or similar. The slots was: Language (Japanese), Social Studies (History, Geography, Social systems) and then Math. They usually gave homework, which was a little up to the parent to enforce. Classes was quite small: elementary school the most, but no more than 10. Middle school was always single digit (5 for my class). Depends on place and economy: When the comapnies Ericsson (Sweden) and Sony (Japan) had a joint division Sony-Ericsson, many classes doubled.

Class didn't differ so much from the normal school in Asia. Less strict. But the school organized a lot of events such as Undoukai (Sports Day), Theater play, and new years/setsubun festival and other things common in Japanese schools. It served as a place for many asian parents to meet each other too, so it became a bit of a community.

Because lack of students the one I went to only had from 1th to 9th grade. In London and bigger cities I heard they have up until high-school. But in Japan, Some colleges have 帰国子女枠 (returnee entrance system) so I know one alumni that went to Tokyo Uni after highschool.

Personally, I liked it. I hated having to go one extra day to school, but being able to have classmate to share part of your culture (before internet was wide-spread) by sharing games, books, toys you brought home from holiday in Japan was very valuable.

Related to the "critical thinking" part of the original article: It was also interesting to read two history books. Especially modern history. The Swedish (pretending to be neutral) one and the Japanese one (pretending they didn't do anything bad) as an example, for WW2 and aftermath. Being exposed to two rhetoric, both technically not a lie (but by omission), definitely piqued my curiosity as a kid.
by openasocket | 2025-08-22 16:19:10+00:00
I saw that! I’m definitely interested in trying it out to see if it helps for our use case. Of course, at this point we’ve reduced allocations so much the GC doesn’t have a ton of work to do, unless we slip up somewhere (which has happened). I’ll probably have to intentionally add some allocations in a hot path as a stress test.

What I would absolutely love is a compacting garbage collector, but my understanding is Go can’t add that without breaking backwards compatibility, and so likely will never do that.
by jlokier | 2025-08-22 16:19:12+00:00
Since we're talking about the UK, in 2010 negotations after a hung parliament produced an opportunity to move towards something a little more representative: The 2011 referendum on changing to AV voting from first-past-the-post.

Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly, and that probably set the trend for a while against further steps to proportional or more direct democratic systems.

AV is a type of transferable vote system, and a step closer to proportional representation. In AV you get two votes, so you can vote for your preferred candidate first (who may be niche but represents you better), and your tactical-vote candidate second (who doesn't represent you but are better than the even-worse candidate). As opposed to the current FPTP system, where you often have to tactical-vote for candidates who don't represent your interests much, and your actual preference is not recorded at all.

Even though AV is far from ideal, if voters had said yes then I think just the symbolism of changing the system, would have resulted in a greater inclination to change the system again later.

AV, STV and PR have been debated a number of times in the UK parliament in the last centery, so it does keep coming up, and will likely come up again, eventually.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-22 16:20:22+00:00
If you haven't seen an LLM output a functional 2K or even 5K LOC program at this point, you probably never will.

The problem space of average people problems that can be addressed with <5K LOC is massive. The only real barrier is having to go through an IDE, but that will almost certainly be solved in the near future, it already sort of is with Canvas features.
by nixosbestos | 2025-08-22 16:20:47+00:00
Ooh! Or remember when a bunch of people acted like they had ascended to heaven for looking down on syntax-highlighting because Rob said something about it being a distraction? Or the swarms blasting me for insisting GOPATH was a nightmare that could only be born of Google's hubris (literally at the same time that `godep` was a thing and Kubernetes was spending significant efforts just fucking dealing with GOPATH.).

Happy to not be in that community, happy to not have to write (or read) Go these days.

And frankly, most of the time I see people gushing about Go, it's for features that trivially exist in most languages that aren't C, or are entirely subjective like "it's easy" (while ignoring, you know, reality).
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-08-22 16:20:56+00:00
An error is better than silent corruption, sure.

But there is no silent corruption when you pass the data as opaque bytes, you just get some placeholder symbols when displayed. This is how I see the file in my terminal and I can rm it just fine.

And yes, question marks in the terminal are way better than applications not working at all.

The case of non-UTF-8 being skipped is usually a characteristic of applications written in languages that don't use bytes for their default string type, not the other way around. This has bitten me multiple times with Python2/3 libraries.
by perihelions | 2025-08-22 16:21:03+00:00
There's actually a pattern of these accounts that look like they were once real people, who stopped commenting, and multiple years later were necromanced as a spam-zombie. You'll notice it clearly if you start looking at the histories of spammers after you [flag] them.

I've complained several times to the mods about it, so I'm sure they're aware too.
by chiffaa | 2025-08-22 16:21:39+00:00
People want sum types because sum types solve a large set of design problems, while being a concept old enough to appear back in SML in 1980s. One of the best phrased complaints I've seen against Go's design is a claim that Go language team ignored 30+ years of programming language design, because the language really seems to introduce design issues and footguns that were solved decades before work on it even started
by djha-skin | 2025-08-22 16:22:08+00:00
Interesting excerpt:

> However, strict moderation is pushing people away. The high barrier to posting and the risk of questions being closed make Stack Overflow feel unwelcoming. Generic forums don’t fill the gap either—they are perceived as too broad, and members lack the expertise that Stack Overflow is known for. Faced with these failures, developers turn to people they know personally because they trust their contact has relevant skills and will respond promptly. Stack Overflow’s opportunity lies in digitally replicating these trusted expert connections.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-22 16:22:14+00:00
Erlang, Elixir, Ada, plenty of others. Erlang and Ada predate Go by several decades, too.

You wanted sources, here's the chapter on tasks and synchronization in the Ada LRM: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22rm/html/RM-9.html

For Erlang and Elixir, concurrent programming is pretty much their thing so grab any book or tutorial on them and you'll be introduced to how they handle it.
by deaddodo | 2025-08-22 16:24:30+00:00
FFMpeg is definitely fairly ubiquitous, but you are overstating its universality quite a bit. There are alternatives that utilize Windows/macOS's native media frameworks, proprietary software that utilizes bespoke frameworks, and libraries that function independently of ffmpeg that offer similar functionality.

That being said, if you put down a pie chart of media frameworks (especially for transcoding or muxing), ffmpeg would have a significant share of that pie.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-22 16:24:48+00:00
Less than 30% of the electorate voted labour. The problem is that the opposing party consistently ran as opposition but then executed on labour's policies instead so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.

The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies, they effectively weren't given a choice. To call that democracy delegtimizes democratic elections.
by reactordev | 2025-08-22 16:24:50+00:00
The best managers I ever had were the ones they flat out said "I'm not an expert, what do you think?" or akin to. Being humble is such a skill. Those managers ended up building huge, amazingly successful teams. The managers that did it their way ended up failing up but at the expense of the team. Everyone who works with them is let go or fired or jumps ship.

Great managers are able to touch on our humanity, which should inspire us all to rise up to meet them.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-22 16:24:56+00:00
"Some of these crawlers appear to be designed to avoid rate limiting based on IP."

Unless the rate is exceeded, the limit is not being avoided

"I regularly see millions of unique ips doing strange requests, each just one or at most a few per day."

Assuming the rate limit is more than one or a few requests every 24h this would be complying with the limit, not avoiding it

It could be that sometimes the problem website operators are concerned about is not "website load", i.e., the problem the article is discussing, it is actually something else (NB. I am not speculating about this particular operator, I am making a general observation)

If a website is able to fulfill all requests from unique IPs without affecting quality of service, then it stands to reason "website load" is not a problem the website operator is having

For example, the article's title claims Meta is amongst the "worst offenders" of creating excessive website load caused by "AI crawlers, fetchers"

Meta has been shown to have used third party proxy services wth rotating IP addresses in order to scrape other websites; it also sued one of these services because it was being used to scrape Meta's website, Facebook

https://brightdata.com/blog/general/meta-dismisses-claim-aga...

Whether the problem that Meta was having with this "scraping" was "website load" is debatable; if the requests were being fulfilled without affecting QoS, then arguably "website load" was not a problem

Rate-limiting addresses the problem of website load; it allows website operators to ensure that requests from all IP addresses are adequately served as opposed to preferentially servicing some IP addresses to the detriment of others (degraded QoS)

Perhaps some website operators become concerned that many unique IP addresses may be under the control of a single entity, and that this entity may be a competitor; this could be a problem for them

But if their website is able to fulfill all the requests it receives without degrading QoS then arguably "website load" is not a problem they are having

NB. I am not suggesting that a high volume of requests from a single entity, each complying with a rate-limit is acceptable, nor am I making any comment about the practice of "scraping" for commercial gain. I am only commenting about what rate-limiting is designed to do and whether it works for that purpose
by guywithahat | 2025-08-22 16:25:06+00:00
The discussion was that this article calls Trump's push for chip making a "fantasy", while Biden made his own push years ago. The chips act was 280 billion, and it was widely viewed as a bill to help Intel, who is/was struggling. Nothing I said was misleading, and you're attempting to misconstrue what was said to win an internet argument with a person you'll never meet in a thread no one else will read.
by abustamam | 2025-08-22 16:25:13+00:00
My wife is 35 weeks pregnant and I go with her to all her OB appts. If we didn't put it on a shared calendar, someone is gonna miss it (though to be honest it'd probably be me, which isn't the end of the world).

We almost never schedule dinners, but we buy cinema tickets ahead of time (or concert tickets, or whatever event). Those ones are hard to remember because the show may be at 6 but doors open at 5 so lots of stuff needs to be coordinated.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-08-22 16:25:15+00:00
Sure ggplot, for example, is finicky, and you need to fuss over it to get the look you are wanting, but then again, it is very flexible. Most of these solutions get frustrating as soon as you want to do, for example, spaghetti plots of within subject repeated measures using age (not time-point) of accelerated longitudinal design data, with fixed effect plots on top. e.g. this plot of mine [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/gw2vV7w
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-22 16:25:23+00:00
> It's like this in the US (or rather, it was 20 years ago. But I suspect it is now worse anyway)

I'm sure it's regional, but my oldest kid started school in SoCal 13 years ago, and it is definitely worse. Nearly every bad decision gets doubled-down on and the good ones seem to lack follow-through. I spent almost a decade trying to improve things and have given up; my youngest goes to private school now.
by goku12 | 2025-08-22 16:25:32+00:00
As someone else already pointed out, it's rather easy to find one law or the other that any particular person has broken - that's a fundamental problem with laws everywhere. So what you suggest is rather impractical when the regime is on a mission to find at least one for every 'guest'. But okay, your country your rules. But there is a catch. If you insist on treating every guest as a criminal to be confirmed, to be marched out like animals on chains without any due process for them to defend their reputation, then get ready to be treated as the ghetto of the world. That's a consequence of every guest and every country expecting to be treated with dignity. That's one thing you cannot control and practically the entire rest of the world is in the other camp.

I'm sure you're confident about the ability of your citizens to hold up the nation without any help. I'm not going to argue. I admire all societies and cultures for their unique abilities and achievements. But you would be worried if you knew how much these 'guests' contributed to your nation's greatness across time and across every strata of your society. They built everything from your earliest railroads to your biggest rockets. They man your remotest farms to the top echelons of your administration. You'd be underestimating their importance to your welfare at your own peril.

But forget the guests. I'm worried about you people too. Nations treat the visas they issue and even asylum requests with great respect. The guests are given almost all the protections as citizens - only the right to influence the governance is denied. But that situation has changed rapidly recently. Not only are the legal guests being abused, the treatment is gradually being extended to legal citizens, with the attempts to cancel birthright and naturalized citizenship. Two measures are extremely concerning - many of the deported immigrants had no criminal records anywhere. And citizens like the 4 year old cancer patient were deported by putting their immigrant parents in an impossible situation. At this rate, how long till they start applying it to citizens like you? Never forget what someone said about 'home growns'. Clearly, your conduct is not what defines your standing. Are you sure you're on the right side in this regime's eyes?

I could taunt you for your confidence, which I wouldn't hold in the same situation. But I don't enjoy anyone's pain or misery. That pain and misery won't be as bad as what others had to suffer due to the cruelty of some of your leaders - like shell-shocked orphans wandering aimlessly in the streets or mothers wailing inconsolably over the graves of their toddler children. But pain is still pain. And I'm worried. Just prepare for whatever is coming and hunker down. No one's future is guaranteed, including mine. So, good luck for now. I hope to continue this conversation on the other side.
by procaryote | 2025-08-22 16:26:11+00:00
Exposing the sharing intent is a problem, not a goal.

Sharing a link is easy. That's why URLs were invented. Exposing the sharing intent is only beneficial to companies that want to track you.

Sure, pressing "share on facebook" might be slightly lower friction than copy-pasting the link, but if the sharing isn't worth that friction, perhaps don't?