MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattmaroon | 2025-08-16 11:37:58+00:00
What is the energy expenditure of getting this rock there? The size of the rock is directly proportional to the amount of freshwater this container can hold right?

How much energy does the barge, or whatever pulls it, spend getting itself and the rock and the container into place and back out?

What is this container made of that it can be large enough for this to be feasible, it is full of only air, and it won’t just collapse under pressure at depth? How much does it weigh? We might be talking a much bigger rock than you are envisioning.

You’re glossing over all sorts of energy input and engineering issues, at some point it’s easier to just pump the remaining stuff up
by antirez | 2025-08-16 11:38:54+00:00
The point is that you don't have to "trust" me, you need to argue with me, we need to discuss about the future. This way, we can form ideas that we can use to understand if a given politician or the other will be right, when we will be called to vote. We can also form stronger ideas to try to influence other people that right now have a vague understanding of what AI is and what it could be. We will be the ones that will vote and choose our future.
by pzo | 2025-08-16 11:40:36+00:00
I think UBI can only buy some time but won't solve the problem. We need fast improvement with AI robots that can be used for automation on mass scale: construction, farming maybe even cooking and food processing.

Right now AI is mostly focused on automating top levels of maslov pyramid hierarchy of needs rather than bottom physiological needs. Once things like shelter (housing), food, utilities (electricity, water, internet) are dirty cheap UBI is less needed.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-16 11:40:45+00:00
> Generally and commonly used payment systems (ie cash) that cannot be centrally censored are the only way to avoid this. Presently that means physical cash, physical precious metals, and cryptocurrency. The first two are impractical for large-scale use.

Tether freezes accounts. Bitcoin gets confiscated. Eth forked when big stakeholders didn't like how the DAO went. And it's a bit hard to take seriously privacy concerns that propose a public transaction ledger as a solution.

(And of the three, only physical cash has actually been proven in large-scale use.)
by johtso | 2025-08-16 11:41:25+00:00
Hermetically open? Where's the download link?

It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download.

Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project..

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...

https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
by roody15 | 2025-08-16 11:41:50+00:00
Reminds me of cellular phones / I hope that one corporation doesn’t lock down the 3d printing industry in a similar way to cell phones.

We really have two types of smartphones Android based and iOS Apple. The patents surrounding wireless radio transmission and cellular connectivity esssentially make it impossible for any competition outside of mega corporations.

The cost is so high that likely only Microsoft could attempt (again) such a move or maybe Amazon or Space X.

“ Extensive Patent Portfolio: Motorola has a large number of patents related to cellular technology, with over 1,900 patent families considered essential to 3G, 4G, and 5G standards, according to Lenovo. Strategic Acquisition: Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2011 was largely driven by the desire to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio to defend Android. Licensing Agreements: Motorola has entered into cross-licensing agreements with other companies, such as Sharp, to share their respective wireless communication technologies. Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs): Motorola holds SEPs related to mobile phone signal standards, obligating them to license these patents to competitors on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. Patent Disputes: Motorola has been involved in patent infringement lawsuits, including cases against companies like Hytera and Apple, regarding their cellular technology patents. ”
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-16 11:41:58+00:00
The question is if (too much) upfront planning is actually better.

IME it's more useful to treat a source file (or new project) like a sketchbook, you start with an empty sheet of paper but already have a rough idea what you want, then you quickly sketch out the outlines, try out different ideas, explore different solutions (all without going into too much detail yet), you step through the code, explore some different paths to get an idea what "feels right", delete things, shuffle them around, rewrite them and slowly filling out the details and that way incrementally get towards the first working version.

Which such an approach of incremental "micro-feedback-loops" you already eliminated a lot of dead ends that will appear anyway despite the best plans - but identifying such dead ends early is much better than late.

This incremental approach also forces you to keep the code small, tidy and malleable. The planning stage basically already happens in source code, and it's not one long planning stage, but many micro-planning-stages.

...this is also my problem with the current state of LLMs, they're pretty good at creating a first initial sketch from a very general problem statement (but only for things that have been done thousands of times by other people - but that's a different issue...) - but the more you'll need to go into the details and discover and fix problems in your initial 'mental design' (e.g. discovering what you actually wanted in the first place), the more the differences to traditional programming disappear, and at some tipping point it gets even more complex because you need to steer the LLM with a language (the human language) that simply isn't useful enough for detailed problem descriptions - that's why lawyers, mathematicians, engineers and scientists all invented their own precise 'DSLs'.

After a few iterations your prompts need to be just as detailed as writing source code in the first place - so what's the point of writing prompts in human language again?

I feel like productivity could be improved much more by improving programming tools (yeah - boring old-school incremental maintenance work) instead of betting on some weird AI future which will just move the focus from writing source code to writing human-language prompts (which IMHO is a definitive step backwards because human language lacks precision - and adding that precision is how you end up with programming languages).

Why are editing, compilation and debugging/testing still separate steps, why do debuggers still have those 60s style bare variable panels instead of realtime visualizations of the internal program state? Why do I still need to wait for a build to finish? Why is version control still such a PITA to work with? Instead everybody is jumping on the AI hype train while everything around them is crumbling into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
by antirez | 2025-08-16 11:42:13+00:00
To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI progresses more in a short timeframe (the big "if" in my blog post), we will see a lot of things done exclusively (and even better 90% of the times, since most humans doing a given work are not excellence in what they do) by AI. This will be fine if governments immediately react and the system changes. Otherwise there will be a lot of people to feed without a job.
by Ray20 | 2025-08-16 11:42:16+00:00
>We learned about microplastics and updated our worldviews?

What are the main sources of microplastics? These are various surface coatings, plastic interior elements, clothing.

But what are the efforts to combat plastic concentrated on? On plastic bags and bottles, plastic straws and dental floss. Seriously? This is less than a percent of plastic use, and this is plastic with a short lifespan. Use and throw away. Near-zero impact on the amount of microplastics in the environment and the environment itself.

Unlike furniture coatings or clothing that are used for decades, regularly exposed to sunlight, which literally knocks microplastic particles off the surface. But instead of fighting plastic coatings, what do the same people who are pushing the fight against plastic bags and straws tell us?

They order us to cover our houses with PLASTIC insulation! LIVE IN MULTILAYER PLASTIC THAT HAS BEEN USED FOR DECADES. But with a plastic straw for drinks. What a crazy joke aimed at clinical idiots.

The fight against plastic in its modern form is a radical totalitarian, destructive cult.

> We saw the oceans become saturated with plastic waste and thought again?

And instead of the cheapest, easiest and most effective way to deal with plastic (just throw it in the garbage pile where it will lie until the end of time with zero impact on the environment and zero microplastic emissions) the cultists make us do what?

They spend a ton of our money on their cultish plastic transformation and what not rituals that ultimately don't work and result in all that plastic ending up in the ocean.
by jameshart | 2025-08-16 11:42:16+00:00
If you need all the orders and all the customers sure.

But usually you need some of the orders and you need the customer info associated with them. Often the set of orders you’re interested in might even be filtered by attributes of the customers they belong to.

The decision of whether to normalize our results of a database query into separate sets of orders and customers, or to return a single joined dataset of orders with customer data attached, is completely orthogonal to the decision of whether to join data in the database.
by richardlblair | 2025-08-16 11:42:20+00:00
If your ORM is going to the DB per row you're using it wrong. N+1 queries are a performance killer. They are easy to spot in any modern APM.

Rails makes this easy to avoid. Using `find_each` batches the queries (by 1,000 records at a time by default).

Reading through the comment section on this has been interesting. Either lots of people using half baked ORMs, people who have little experience with an ORM, or both.
by oftenwrong | 2025-08-16 11:44:07+00:00
A boolean is smaller, which is a relevant consideration for some workloads. For example, you may be pre-aggregating a large amount of data to serve a set of analytical queries which do not care about the associated timestamp. The smaller data type is more efficient both in storage and in query execution.

Additionally, there are situations where it is logical to store a boolean. For example, if the boolean denotes an outcome:

process_executed_at timestamp not null process_succeeded boolean not null
by whodidntante | 2025-08-16 11:44:16+00:00
Never write an article about good system design.

In all seriousness, this is an extraordinary subtle and complex area, and there are few rules.

For example, "if you need data from multiple tables, JOIN them instead of making separate queries and stitching them together in-memory" may be useful in certain circumstances. For highly scalable consumer systems, the rule of "avoid joins as much as possible" can work a lot better.

There is also no mention of how important it is to understand the business - usage patterns, the customers, the data, the scale of data, the scale of usage, security, uptime and reliability requirements, reporting requirements, etc.
by narrator | 2025-08-16 11:44:30+00:00
I like to point out that ASI will allow us to do superhuman stuff that was previously beyond all human capability.

For example, one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is to ask it to design implants that would go into the legs that would be powered by light, or electric induction that would use ASI designed protein metabolic chains to electrically transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and ADP into ATP so to power humans with pure electricity. We are very energy efficient. We use about 3 kilowatt hours of power a day, so we could use this sort of technology to live in space pretty effortlessly. Your Space RV would not need a bathroom or a kitchen. You'd just live in a static nitrogen atmosphere and the whole thing could be powered by solar panels, or a small modular nuke reactor. I call this "The Electrobiological Age" and it will unlock whole new worlds for humanity.
by rvz | 2025-08-16 11:44:36+00:00
Now you are seeing the great electric car scam - Selling you an under-powered electric car and to increase its power you must pay for a subscription to unlock it's full power capabilities.

The best part is, many won't care (when they should). But these days, it is okay to get scammed isn't it?

BMW tried selling a subscription on heated seats, but that failed. [0], So lets see how long this will last.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421730
by lillecarl | 2025-08-16 11:44:37+00:00
OVPN successfully evaded Hollywood(through pressure on Swedish institutions) 5 years ago when they were up ThePirateBays ass again.

You still have to trust them, you're not wrong but at some point I'll fall back to the common question security people(not me) tell paranoid doubters: Whats your threat model?

If you're running a global child-abusing ring through Mullvad or OVPN(offers static IPv4 for inbound traffic) I don't know what they'd do but they've proved themselves over and over to be organisations you can trust.

OVPN turns around about 1.2M$ with 0.8M$ profit (0), Mullvad turns around significantly more money but with less profit margin (1) (probably funneling profits to a tax haven) so the risk of someone buying out OVPN is there, but "you" are probably not worth it if the ones targeting TPB didn't figure out how to get through.

You can still run TOR over their VPNs as another layer if you're uncertain their reputation is trustworthy enough for your usecase but don't want TOR traffic originating from your IP.

https://claude.ai/share/a47c19f7-8782-4a9f-ae26-2d2adb52eaed

0: https://www.allabolag.se/foretag/ovpn-integritet-ab/-/konsul... 1: https://www.allabolag.se/foretag/mullvad-vpn-ab/g%C3%B6tebor...

You can look up any Swedish company through sites like allabolag or merinfo if you're curious... until they grow into tax-evading evil megacorps :)
by motorest | 2025-08-16 11:44:52+00:00
What a great article. It's always a treat to read this sort of take.

I have some remarks though. Taken from the article:

> Avoid having five different services all write to the same table. Instead, have four of them send API requests (or emit events) to the first service, and keep the writing logic in that one service.

This is not so cut-and-dry. The trade offs are far from obvious or acceptable.

If the five services access the database then you are designing a distributed system where the interface being consumed is the database, which you do not need to design or implement, and already supports authorization and access controls out of the box, and you have out-of-the-box support for transactions and custom queries. On the other hand, if you design one service as a high-level interface over a database then you need to implement and manage your own custom interface with your own custom access controls and constrains, and you need to design and implement yourself how to handle transactions and compensation strategies.

And what exactly do you buy yourself? More failure modes and a higher micro services tax?

Additionally, having five services accessing the same database is a code smell. Odds are that database fused together two or three separate databases. This happens a lot, as most services grow by accretion and adding one more table to a database gets far less resistance than proposing creating an entire new persistence service. And is it possible that those five separate services are actually just one or two services?
by shlant | 2025-08-16 11:45:57+00:00
> Adderall can cause a high

> Interesting. FYI ADHD people feel none of that.

Please don't speak for a whole group of people when you don't know what you're talking about. Euphoria is very common when people with ADHD first start taking amphetamines, it just goes away after a week or so.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-16 11:46:05+00:00
> I guess people don't WANT to see the reality that is change and prefer to just look away and cope?

Yes. But frankly, it's hard to blame them. It's just a shitty social contract where you spend lots of time gaining skills and by the time you're done your field has been completely obsoleted.

I'm a huge fan of making comparisons to how things used to work before industrial revolution, because that's what our brains evolved for. If your father was a blacksmith, you'd be a blacksmith too, and so would be your son. It was difficult to imagine a world that simply would stop needing blacksmiths. So it's completely normal that our brains spend first 20 years learning, and once we're done learning, we just apply that knowledge to everyday life, save for minor tweaks here and there.

Then it became a requirement to keep learning your entire life because the world kept changing. This sucks, but it's not completely infeasible, so people rolled with it, especially that new positions were cozy and well-paid, and there was some gentle exit path for those who were too old to learn new things.

But now we're in a situation where the society tells you that there's huge demand for given skill, and then your entire profession gets completely obliberated before you're even halfway done with your studies. In such environment it's simply impossible to create a realistic career plan, let alone have energy for luxuries such as raising a family or maintaining social connections. This isn't good.

AI has objectively made our life worse, and everyone is completely clueless how the situation develops. Denying everything and hoping to wait things out might actually be just as good of an attitude like any other. Because honestly tell me - even if we assume the most optimistic scenario "AGI within five years" - how the fuck do I plan my career?
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-16 11:46:22+00:00
This video proves nothing other than "a YouTuber found a funny viral video idea".

Teslas "interpret the environment in 3D space" too - by feeding all the sensor data into a massive ML sensor fusion pipeline, and then fusing that data across time too.

This is where the visualizers, both the default user screen one and the "Terminator" debugging visualizer, get their data from. They show plain and clear that the car operates in a 3D environment.

You could train those cars to recognize and avoid Wile E. Coyote traps too, but do you really want to? The expected amount of walls set in the middle of the road with tunnels painted onto them is very close to zero.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-16 11:47:15+00:00
I've tried this approach but at some point you're just coding in a less precise language (English), and with more duplication.

My current approach is to stub out the architecture I want, write the type definitions I want in full, and ask Claude to fill in the blanks. It's good at implementing an interface but bad at devising the interface on its own.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-16 11:47:23+00:00
> But the author also mentioned the screenshot approach before using Passkit and called it the naive approach, so it’s likely they did something considerably simpler.

I guess I didn't realize it was that simple a question.

The "how" there is "take a screenshot of the first-party app". In many cases (especially with physical barcodes like a loyalty card you can just photograph), that's all you need; just keep it in your photo roll. It didn't work in this case because the QR codes contain some sort of signature or expiration date that prevents a screenshot from last week from working this week.

If it has to be in wallet, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/passkit/pkpasstype....
by tyleo | 2025-08-16 11:47:26+00:00
I’m pro lounge after previously thinking luxuries were frivolous.

The first time I paid to get into a lounge my flight was cancelled. The lounge staff called us up to the desk and rebooked us on first class (a huge upgrade). On the way to our new flight we passed the angry line of travelers from our canceled flight.

I know it’s not a typical experience but the year of membership felt worth it for me just for that one moment.
by theeunderdog | 2025-08-16 11:47:58+00:00
I just launched my first website — with $0.

It’s called Can I Afford This House? — a free, no-BS calculator for first-time home buyers.

No email. No spam. No upsell.

Just answer.

I built it because every time I Googled “Can I afford a $300k house on $60k salary?” — I got:

Pushy mortgage lenders Sites that wanted my email Clunky bank calculators So I built the tool I wanted.

Built on GitHub Pages (can’t afford a domain yet). Hosted for free. Open to feedback.

Try it: https://nyanguno.github.io/caniaffordthishouse/

Since launching, I’ve: Gotten 130K+ views (before Reddit removed it) Added user-requested features (HOA, maintenance, reverse mode) Learned more about finance, UX, and real estate than I ever expected

I’m not a dev. Not a finance guy. Just a recent grad who shipped something real.

If you’re building something in public, I’d love to connect.

And if you know someone house-hunting — feel free to share it.
by avar | 2025-08-16 11:48:55+00:00
I use it, and love it.

But it's not intended for or good at (without forcing a square peg into a round hole) the sort of thing LFS and promisors are for, which is a public project with binary assets.

git-annex is really for (and shines at) a private backup solution where you'd like to have N copies of some data around on various storage devices, track the history of each copy, ensure that you have at least N copies etc.

Each repository gets a UUID, and each tracked file has a SHA-256 hash. There's a branch which has a timestamp and repo UUID to SHA-256 mapping, if you have 10 repos that file will have (at least) 10 entries.

You can "trust" different repositories to different degrees, e.g. if you're storing a file on both some RAID'd storage server, or an old portable HD you're keeping in a desk drawer.

This really doesn't scale for a public project. E.g. I have a repository that I back up my photos and videos in, that repository has ~700 commits, and ~6000 commits to the metadata "git-annex" branch, pretty close to a 1:10 ratio.

There's an exhaustive history of every file movement that's ever occurred on the 10 storage devices I've ever used for that repository. Now imagine doing all that on a project used by more than one person.

All other solutions to tracking large files along with a git repository forgo all this complexity in favor of basically saying "just get the rest where you cloned me from, they'll have it!".
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-16 11:49:04+00:00
> LLMs have no ability to understand when to stop and ask for directions.

I haven't read TFA so I may be missing the point. However, I have had success getting Claude to stop and ask for directions by specifically prompting it to do so. "If you're stuck or the task seems impossible, please stop and explain the problem to me so I can help you."
by marstall | 2025-08-16 11:49:16+00:00
> no job remaining that a human can do better or cheaper than a machine this is the lump of labor fallacy. jobs machines do produce commodities. commodities don't have much value. humans crave value - its a core component of our psyche. therefore new things will be desired, expensive things ... and only humans can create expensive things, since robots dont get salaries