MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ManBeardPc | 2025-08-06 11:02:29+00:00
Software rot is a big problem in many business tools. Everything not recently built from the tip of main is probably no longer working. APIs change, URLs change, Processes change, newer versions of dependencies no longer work because of version conflicts or deprecation without replacement. The amount of work just to fix the rot is constantly rising. No care is spent to keep things stable. Stable interfaces are really something I learnt to appreciate more and more, even if sometimes crusty and verbose. If it is reliably working don't replace it without a very good reason. I attribute these problems mostly to agile the way it is practiced in many companies. Only thinking in providing "value" per sprint and little to no planning ahead, prioritizing ease of change over everything else.
by crinkly | 2025-08-06 11:03:19+00:00
User retention is a more important metric. Everyone is silent there. That is directly tied to MRR, long term viability and ROI for investment. If those were positive I'd expect them to be crowing about it, but they aren't.

Capacity just means there is currently more demand than supply and that might be a number of negative factors driving that: users with no ROI (free users), too rapid growth, poor efficiency etc etc.
by cmurf | 2025-08-06 11:03:24+00:00
It’s a cult.

But also, they’re being misled. Most non-Trumpers coddle, forgive in advance, and invite Trumper friends and family to the usual social functions. This is permission. It’s helping everyone normalize the depravity.

In a very real way there’s no conversation happening because one party has removed themselves from rationality and the other party has broadcast they don’t care.

There will need to be enormous amounts of pain to get either party to snap out of it.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-06 11:03:31+00:00
PYTHON(1) General Commands Manual PYTHON(1) NAME python - an object-oriented programming language SYNOPSIS python [ -c command | script | - ] [ arguments ] DESCRIPTION Python is the standard programming language.

Computer scientists love Python, not just because whitespace comes first ASCIIbetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves Python because it's PYTHON!
by komali2 | 2025-08-06 11:03:35+00:00
Pull out method is a less viable method of preventing pregnancy, and especially less viable at preventing STDs. However, it's still considered a contraceptive strategy.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/withdr...

For every 100 people who use pull out method perfectly, within a year, 4 will get pregnant. Since not everyone does a great job doing it, in reality 22 get pregnant every year.

Here's a great overview page: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control in summary, condoms are 87% effective at preventing pregnancy, and withdrawal is 78% effective.

For a going-steady couple that isn't worried about STDs, keeps an emergency contraceptive ('morning after pill') ready for oopsie mistakes, and live in a country that grants women bodily autonomy (or have discussed and accepted that a mistake might lead to a child), pullout is a perfectly valid contraceptive mechanism. There are better, but considering that basically every method except a condom/internal condom can cause extreme discomfort or bad side effects to the woman in the relationship, I think it's totally fine to choose pull-out.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-06 11:04:37+00:00
The free-beer commercial ChatGPT or Gemini can read them and point out major errors. Larger Gemma models and huge Chinese models like full DeepSeek or Kimi K2 may work too. Sometimes the answer is odd enough that some 7B models can notice it. Technically there are no guarantee that models with same name in different sizes like Qwen 3 0.6B and 27B uses the same dataset, but it kind of tells a bit about quality and compositions of dataset that their creator owns.

I don't actually need accurate answers to those questions, it's just an expectation adjuster for me, so to speak. There should be better questions for other languages/use cases, but these seem to correlate better with model sizes and scales of companies than flappy birds.

0: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/abdf0a12ad73ada3b886d2d2edcc...

1: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/b1c37d15bb1b19809468c933faef...
by JimDabell | 2025-08-06 11:04:44+00:00
> I do wonder how many of their users pay and whether that covers the free users.

It doesn’t cover the free users, but that’s normal startup strategy. They are using investor cash to grow as quickly as possible. This involves providing as much free service as they can afford so that some of those free users convert to paid customers. At any point they can decide not to give so much free service away to rebalance in favour of profitability over growth. The cost of inference is plummeting, so it’s getting cheaper to service those free users all the time.

> It’s like those extremely cheap food and grocery delivery apps, they made their food cheap, no delivery fees for a while… […] they started to run out of VC money, they had to raise prices

That’s not the same situation because that makes the product more expensive for the customers, which will hit sales. This isn’t the same as cutting back on a free tier, because in that situation you’re not doing anything to harm your customers’ service.
by keyKeeper | 2025-08-06 11:06:40+00:00
Okay, what's stopping you from feeding the code into an LLM and re-write it and make it yours? You can even add extra steps like make it analyze the code block by block then supervise it as it is rewriting it. Bam. AI age IP freedom.

Morals may stop you but other than that? IMHO all open source code is public domain code if anyone is willing to spend some AI tokens.
by digitcatphd | 2025-08-06 11:06:56+00:00
Respectfully, starting one's argument with a factually invalid statement is not a good way to argue against a bubble. If by 'every' you are referring to the foundation model providers, this is not 100% of the 'AI service' market and even then, I would argue that a lot of this demand will need to be answered to by companies measuring ROI after the FOMO or unreasonable expectations get settled in and right now, my primary argument is this ROI is driven by speculation rather than empirical measurement.

I have spoken with many companies and nearly all of them, when speaking about AI, have gotten to the point they don't even make any sense. A common theme is 'we need' AI, but nobody can articulate 'why' and in-fact they get defensive when questioned. It is almost perfectly parallel to the 'we need blockchain' argument or 'we need a mobile app'. That isn't to say those are not useful technologies, but the rapid rise, steep decline, then gradual rise is a theme in tech.
by jfarmer | 2025-08-06 11:07:17+00:00
I sometimes find Paul Watzlawick's five axioms of communication helping in thinking about situations like this.

Link: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick#Five_basic_axi...)

1. One cannot not communicate 2. Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication 3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners' communication procedures 4. Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities 5. Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary

Re: (1), the "mere" act of using AI communicates something, just like some folks might register a text message as more (or less) intimate than a phone call, email, etc. The choice of modality is always part of what's communicated, part of the act of communication, and we can't stop that. Re: (2), that communication is then classified by each person's idea of what the relationship is.

This is a dramatic and expensive way to learn they had different ideas of their relationship!

Of course, in a teacher/student situation, it's the teacher's job to make it clear to the students what the relationship is. Otherwise you risk relationship-damaging "surprises" like this.

Even ignoring the normative question of what a teacher Should™ do in that situation, it was counterproductive. Whatever benefit the teacher thought AI would provide, they'd (hopefully) agree it was outweighed by the cost to their relationship w/ students. All future interactions w/ those students will now be X% harder.

There's a kind of technical rationale which says that if (1) the GOAL is to improve the student's output and (2) I would normally do that by giving one or more rounds of feedback and waiting for the student to incorporate it then (3) I should use AI because it will help us reach that goal faster and more efficiently.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.”

The act of receiving and incorporating feedback is not "inefficient", especially not in a school setting. The consummation of that process is part of the goal. Maybe the most important part!

Full Dewey quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597741
by sjw987 | 2025-08-06 11:07:30+00:00
You just haven't got there yet. You haven't failed.

It really just comes down to eating less and healthier. Some people have metabolic differences either side, but they don't amount to a great deal.

Weight loss drugs suppressing your appetite literally shows this to be true. You just need to do it yourself without the drug. Eventually you'd want to come off the drug, right? When that happens, you would need to do just this.

Every time I've heard somebody say they've tried everything, they usually haven't. It's not a failing, it's an opportunity to keep trying and get it right.
by xienze | 2025-08-06 11:08:00+00:00
> don't try to tell me I failed because of a lack of effort, understanding, exercise, "discipline", etc.

Not to be _too_ rude here, but clearly you missed the mark on at least one of those things. If you're burning more energy than you're consuming, it's impossible to not lose weight. Maybe you underestimated how many calories you were consuming, overestimated how many calories you were burning, didn't do it often enough, didn't do it for a long enough period of time, had a few too many "cheat days", or some combination thereof.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-08-06 11:08:28+00:00
>employees were given until August 10 to decide whether they want to take the buyout, which amounts to nine months of salary

This isn't a "buyout" and it certainly isn't "making them whole" which is what they said they'd do a couple of weeks ago. This is just a layoff with a severance payment.

As I said when the initial story broke, this is setting a terrible precedent for the startup world. Why on earth would anyone join a startup and accept low cash comp in exchange for equity if the default terminal event will be an acqui-hire of the founders with all other employees being shown the door rather than an IPO or acquisition?
by energy123 | 2025-08-06 11:08:43+00:00
Israel was losing the Yom Kippur war until Kissinger's resupply effort. They didn't use nukes. Probably because Egypt signalled they were going for limited objectives. Israel's home front was also attacked unprovoked with Scud missiles by Saddam as a desperation measure during the Gulf War. No nuke usage.

Any US attack on China's industrial base would have similar signalling to control escalation risk. It would probably be limited to key nodes in the missile or drone supply chain rather than attacking the entire base. China likely wouldn't use nukes because they are also worried about the same escalation risks as the US. They will know the US is pursuing limited objectives. The US will probably tell them this through a deconfliction line, as well as publicly. If China does use nukes, it'll likely be limited with the goal of escalating to deescalate.

None of these decisions are easy and I agree there are significant risks. But I wouldn't rule it out, especially if the alternative is to lose a war of attrition and have your influence rolled back.
by cmurf | 2025-08-06 11:09:15+00:00
Absolutely there is a strong component of cognitive dissonance: the truth hurts, lies are soothing.

The truth? They do not care about basic right and wrong. They voted for a rapist, a felon, a vile insurrectionist. There’s no morality and we know this based on how they’ve voted.

But also the unwillingness by their friends and family to call them out promotes non-accountability. For everyone.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-06 11:09:25+00:00
Exactly. I've made the case before that while it may be a temporarily winning approach in business (aside from becoming persona non grata with most banks' risk departments), it's a losing strategy in international geopolitics.

Because counterparty countries will still exist, you'll need to make future deals, and they'll remember the last time you fucked them over.
by jart | 2025-08-06 11:09:29+00:00
The world's most successful open source developer didn't converge on that communication style for no reason. I don't think I've seen a single person bring up the classism inherent in dictating gentlemanly manners. Part of what made open source unique is that people from all classes could participate, and working class people are not tuned to pick up on subtle communication the way the upper classes have been. Linus likes to communicate in a way that leaves no ambiguity about he feels, to people of any class background, or any level of English language proficiency. The tradeoff is it offends the sensibilities of highly domesticated elites.
by ben_w | 2025-08-06 11:09:35+00:00
Allow me to answer with a rhetorical question:

S8O2bm5lbiBTaWUgZGllc2VuIFNhdHogbGVzZW4sIGRhIGVyIGluIEJhc2UtNjQta29kaWVydGVtIERldXRzY2ggdm9ybGllZ3Q/IEhhYmVuIFNpZSBkaWUgQW50d29ydCB2b24gR3J1bmQgYXVmIGVyc2NobG9zc2VuIG9kZXIgaGFiZW4gU2llIG51ciBCYXNlIDY0IGVya2FubnQgdW5kIGRhcyBFcmdlYm5pcyBkYW5uIGluIEdvb2dsZSBUcmFuc2xhdGUgZWluZ2VnZWJlbj8gV2FzIGlzdCDDvGJlcmhhdXB0IOKAnnJlYXNvbmluZ+KAnCwgd2VubiBtYW4gbmljaHQgZGFzIEdlbGVybnRlIGF1cyBlaW5lbSBGYWxsIGF1ZiBlaW5lbiBhbmRlcmVuIGFud2VuZGV0Pw==

And yes, that's a question. Well, three, but still.
by btown | 2025-08-06 11:11:19+00:00
I think an important bit of context here is that computers are very, very good at speculative happy-path execution.

The examples in the article seem gloomy: how could a JIT possibly do all the checks to make sure the arguments aren’t funky before adding them together, in a way that’s meaningfully better than just running the interpreter? But in practice, a JIT can create code that does these checks, and modern processors will branch-predict the happy path and effectively run it in parallel with the checks.

JavaScript, too, has complex prototype chains and common use of boxed objects - but v8 has made common use cases extremely fast. I’m excited for the future of Python.
Show HN: Brandolia – Build your brand in under 1 minute with AI
by kokau | 2025-08-06 11:11:30+00:00
Hey HN! We just launched Brandolia, an AI-first branding platform designed for founders, indie-makers, designers, and creators.

What it does: Enter your brand name + industry

Instantly get: A professional 4K logo A coherent color palette + typography A compelling slogan, storytelling, and brand vision A tailored marketing strategy

Coming soon: business cards, banners, websites, integrations…

I built Brandolia because so many of us lose days stuck in naming/branding before even starting to build. Brand building shouldn’t slow you down.

Would love to hear feedback, feature suggestions, or questions. Thanks! – Corentin, solo founder of Brandolia
by jaggs | 2025-08-06 11:12:24+00:00
But that's my point exactly. If you're not that fond of the UK, by all means go and live somewhere else and ensure your tax burden is minimized. But it's interesting that out of the 145,000 directors in the UK, only 1000 have chosen to jump ship because of these supposedly punitive new regulations.

I also find it very difficult to be sympathetic to folks who feel that their large amount of money earns them the right to minimize the payment of taxes in the country they live. It just seems a little selfish to me. Sorry about that.
by hollowonepl | 2025-08-06 11:14:09+00:00
Good findings, the rest not surprising tho.. online recruitment doesn't work at all these days. most likely your app wasn't read by anybody meaningful and did not trigger right flags in the HR system to even be spotted by clueless ladies working there.

This post can give you some visibility unless somebody sees it as frustration/negativity then they won't bother either.

aside of the core topic, best way to get a job these days is unfortunately either some elite job boards that work and both sides know why... or personal relations.

All the automatic HR/recruitment platforms is illness and i'm sure that's what victimized your genuine application there.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-06 11:14:14+00:00
In my experience on FF 40-60mm primes are always the lightest, the smallest, and the brightest (and unfortunately for me I tend to like these focal lengths the least). For comparison, Sony’s 50mm f2.8 FE weights 235 grams and costs less than $700, and I recall seeing various manual pancake lenses that are probably lighter and much smaller.

It sounds like an MF setup with say a 28mm and a 100mm equivalent lens would require more work but possible (though maybe not enjoyable) to casually carry around.

When shooting raw stills I don’t particularly care about speed. I do enjoy shooting raw CinemaDNG video, there are reasonably priced FF bodies that support it, but if I get a camera for high-quality stills FPS wouldn’t really be a deal-breaker for my uses (I guess it might for bird watching or for sports).
by jaggs | 2025-08-06 11:14:49+00:00
I'm not sure that's quite the argument you think it is? The fact is that losing a thousand well-off selfish people is not really going to put a dent in the UK's financial well-being at all is it? This is not a question of 'for the better good' at all. There are hundreds of thousands of very rich people who choose to stay and contribute to the society in which they live. Which is admirable.
by ozgung | 2025-08-06 11:15:10+00:00
These examples show that we have a serious social issue, and it's not limited to teachers. People misuse LLMs. We engineers understand that LLMs are products under development. They only work correctly under certain circumstances, and they have limitations and non-perfect evaluation metrics. Regular people (non-engineers) treat them as finished products or magic wands. They ignore the warnings in the page saying LLM can make mistakes. And there are billions of those people. This may create huge social problems that engineers can't fix.
by VignuB | 2025-08-06 11:15:24+00:00
Great to know that we have the option to use uBOL on Safari. uBO is arguably the best adblocker on Firefox (and on Chromium browsers still on manifest v2.)

Not to be a downer, but why should I use this over existing well performing content blockers like Wipr 2 or Adguard? But yes, I get it more the options for us users the merrier!
by satyrun | 2025-08-06 11:15:26+00:00
IMO I think it is a combination of being a really great programmer already and then either not all that intellectually curious or so well read and so intellectually curious that LLMs are a step down from being a voracious reader of books and papers.

For me, LLMs are also the most useful thing ever but I was a C student in all my classes. My programming is a joke. I have always been intellectually curious but I am quite lazy. I have always had tons of ideas to explore though and LLMS let me explore these ideas that I either wouldn't be able to otherwise or would be too lazy to bother.
Ask HN: Oreilly Courses Recommendations
by ankitg12 | 2025-08-06 11:16:29+00:00
I have annual Oreilly subscription, and I want to make good use of it. I have found some good course content previously, but it's been little hard to find off late with lots of non tech content on the site. Does any one have recommendations for the courses they have enjoyed / liked which are technically hands-on. I am mainly looking for content on Python, Networking, Distributed Systems etc. Not looking for frontend/UI technologies.
by ankitg12 | 2025-08-06 11:18:10+00:00
These are some of the courses I have liked and learnt well from:

Python Programming Language - https://learning.oreilly.com/course/python-programming-langu...

Effective Python - https://learning.oreilly.com/course/effective-python/9780134...

Designing Data Structures in Python - https://learning.oreilly.com/course/designing-data-structure...
by Aachen | 2025-08-06 11:19:23+00:00
Impressive technical achievement, but in terms of whether I'd use it: oof, that male voice is like one of these fake-excited newsreaders. Like they're always at the edge of their breath. The female one is better but still someone reading out an advertisement for a product they were told they must act extra excited for. I assume this is what the majority of training data was like and not an intentional setting for the demo. Unsure whether I could get used to that

I use TTS on my phone regularly and recently also tried this new project on F-Droid called SherpaTTS, which grabs some models from Huggingface. They're super heavy (the phone suspends other apps to disk while this runs) and sound good, but in the first news article there were already one or two mispronunciations because it's guessing how to say uncommon or new words and it's not based on logical rules anymore to turn text into speech

Google and Samsung have each a TTS engine pre-installed on my device and those sound and work fine. A tad monotonous but it seems to always pronounce things the same way so you can always work out what the text said

Espeak (or -ng) is the absolute worst, but after 30 seconds of listening closely you get used to it and can understand everything fine. I don't know if it's the best open source option (probably there are others that I should be trying) but it's at least the most reliable where you'll always get what is happening and you can install it on any device without licensing issues
by allanmacgregor | 2025-08-06 11:19:33+00:00
I don't know if you realize that your comment about the "magic box" is essentially a modern version of "bread and circuses"; the idea that entertainment and distraction can substitute for genuine agency, security, and opportunity. Smartphones don't pay rent, cure illness, or provide economic mobility.

Saying that technology advanced alongside extreme wealth inequality doesn't prove inequality was necessary for that advancement.

Your argument is effectively a deflection from the real question, which is whether life is better than medieval times, but whether we could have the technology benefits we have today without the power concentration and disparity.