MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IT4MD | 2025-08-22 20:33:36+00:00
I'm rapidly getting to the point of joining that group.

I'm getting real tired of fighting tax breaks for people with 131 Scrooge McDuck piles of money already, at the cost of services a large portion of the country uses or may need.

To be clear, I don't have kids, but want my tax dollars to fund free lunches, but we can't have that. Instead we get garbage like public school busses being used to drive kids to private schools, while the public school students walk. (See Ohio)
by englishm | 2025-08-22 20:34:04+00:00
So... MoQ represents a bit of a moving away from the all-in-one "black box" of web APIs like WebRTC. From the browser perspective, the main thing that matters is the WebTransport API. Using MoQT in conjunction with that WebTransport API, you now have various options for rendering the video as a player, for example: WebCodecs. But, if you can afford a bit more latency, you can also use APIs like MSE for playback and be able to use DRM.

And yeah, being able to publish from something like OBS is something I worked on before joining Cloudflare, but it depends a lot on what you do at the "streaming format" layer which is where all the media-aware details live. That layer is still evolving and developing with WARP being the leading spec so far. As that gels more, it'll make sense to bake things into OBS, etc. Already today though you can use Norsk (https://norsk.video/) to publish video using a rudimentary fMP4-based format similar to early versions of the WARP draft.

As for YouTube, Google has some folks who have been very active contributors to MoQT, but I'm not certain exactly how/where/when they plan to deploy it in products like YouTube.
by kixelated | 2025-08-22 20:34:28+00:00
Chrome and Firefox support WebTransport. Safari has announced intent to support it and they already use QUIC under the hood for HTTP/3.

Cloud services are pretty TCP/HTTP centric which can be annoying. Any provider that gives you UDP support can be used with QUIC, but you're in charge of certificates and load balancing.

QUIC is client->server so NATs are not a problem; 1 RTT to establish a connection. Iroh is an attempt at P2P QUIC using similar techniques to WebRTC but I don't think browser support will be a thing.
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-22 20:34:52+00:00
Heh. It always starts this way... then they confidently send me something that breaks on testing it, then half a dozen more iterations, then "python2 is doing the wrong thing" or, "I could get this working but it isn't worth the effort" but sure, let's do this one more time. Could be they were all missing something obvious - wouldn't know, I avoid python personally, apart from when necessary like with LLM glue. https://pastebin.com/j4Lzb5q1

This is a script created by someone on #nethack a long time ago. It works great with other things as well like old BBS games. It was intended to transparently rewrite single byte encodings to multibyte with an optional conversion array.
by arp242 | 2025-08-22 20:34:59+00:00
> they operate in a self-serving echo chamber.

Like HN isn't on these type of topics. Just an hour ago you said that they're trying to kill XSLT because it "not a tool for surveillance capitalism"[1]. A claim made completely unencumbered by any evidence, of course. It's little more than a nonsensical conspiracy theory.

There's a reason all the major browsers are kind of on-board with this, just like there's a reason it never got updated much beyond XSLT 1. If XSLT would be proposed today, adding it to browsers would be a complete non-starter. Newer browsers like Servo or Ladybird have not even mentioned XSLT as near as I can find. It's very low low on their priority list, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people working on those browsers would prefer to not implement it at all.

The funny thing about people stuck in echo chambers is that they cannot comprehend how anyone could disagree with them, so then they reach to conspiracy theories to "explain" this, completely ignoring all the technical arguments.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988418
by th0ma5 | 2025-08-22 20:35:03+00:00
I think you're getting at a very often discussed ebb and flow between being extremely controlled vs extremely flexible. XML was astounding compared to system specific proprietary systems, and then as the need for formalism grew people wanted something simpler... And now you see the same thing growing with JSON and the need for more rigor. I personally think there are many forces to all of this, just the context at the time, prevailing senses of which things are chores and which aren't, companies trying to gain advantage, but probably most importantly is that the vast majority of people have a subset of historical information about systems and computer science, myself included, yet we have to get things done.
by troupo | 2025-08-22 20:35:08+00:00
> It’s been implemented in Chromium for 4–6 years

It makes it a non-official Chrome-only non-standard

> Firefox’s position is positive (admittedly that was 2019), WebKit’s is neutral,

Positions don't make a spec

> but this one is not really like that—it’s just that the other two platforms are missing a couple of other pieces

It literally means that in the very literal sense of the word literal:

The "Status of this document" section states the following:

--- start quote ---

This document is a draft of a potential specification. It has no official standing of any kind and does not represent the support or consensus of any standards organization.

--- end quote ---

Which part of that tells you that "it's not like that"? It's not even on a standards track. It's not even a Working Draft (the very first level of a spec when vendors agree on the idea, but haven't iterated on the API: https://www.w3.org/policies/process/#rec-track)

> the share_target manifest reference is still way more “official” than that.

Google presents these napkin scribbles in the w3c format precisely so that gullible people would wave them around as actual specs.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-22 20:36:04+00:00
> I remember you could point to a stylesheet to apply to an XML file.

You still can. That's exactly what this article is about: XSLT is that stylesheet. You can publish XML-structured data that machines can ingest, and you can attach XSLT to that data so that humans can view the exact same file in a human-friendly way. The browser constructs, according to the XSL transform rules, a Document Object Model out of the XML, and then it usually applies CSS to that DOM. No duplication of files, no "click here to get to the actual data." I've got some OPML (lists of podcasts) and RSS (podcast) XML files that are also human-readable web pages thanks to this; the exact same web address works for your favorite podcast app and for human viewing.

> I really wish we could apply CSS stylesheets to a JSON.

I don't think what you want is CSS in the first instance, but in the second: first you'd want a template transformation language like XLST is for XML. You'd want to be able to say not just "show these values in this font" but "for each key matching this pattern, create a DOM element containing that key, then another element containing its value," and then style them with CSS when a whole document has been generated out of the JSON. XML with XSLT almost always also included CSS to handle fonts and whatnot.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-22 20:36:16+00:00
> I've seen it in bits and pieces. It would have been beautiful.

XHTML being based on XML tried to be a strict standard in a world where a non-strict standard existed and everybody became just very much aware on a daily that a non-strict standard is much easier to work with.

I think it's very hard to compete with that.
by digikata | 2025-08-22 20:36:30+00:00
This seems around the durability that most databases can reach. Aside from more specialized hardware arrangements, with a single computer, embedded database there is always a window of data loss. The durability expectation is that some in-flight window of data will be lost, but on restart, it should recover to a consistent state of the last settled operation if at all possible.

A related questions is if the code base is mature enough when configured for higher durability to work as intended. Even with Rust, there needs to be some hard systems testing and it's often not just a matter of sprinkling flushes around. Further optimization can try to close the window tighter - maybe with a transaction log, but then you obviously trade some speed for it.
by channel_t | 2025-08-22 20:36:39+00:00
Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.
by labcomputer | 2025-08-22 20:36:54+00:00
> All too predictably, a recent investigation [1] found Brightline is the deadliest passenger railroad in the US.

Gosh, why won't those awful railroad do something to stop their trains from suddenly and completely unpredictably swerving into automobiles?!?

There ought to be a law requiring them to put up signs to notify motorists about the hazard these big dangerous trains that can just suddenly appear out of nowhere. We should also demand bright flashing lights on the fronts of trains as well, so the public can see them at night.

Additionally, I know this might be controversial, I think they should install some kind of automatic motorized "gate" with flashing red lights anywhere that a train might flitter near a roadway. The gate would block the road any time a train is nearby to prevent anyone from getting close to the train. In my imagining, railroads would be required to post signs at these "crossing gates" with the phone number of a 24/7 staffed call center that can stop trains if a car is stuck near the gates or the gates are working.

Boy, I sure wish someone would have thought to install basic precautions like these before allowing these trains to just dart all over the place, willy-nilly.
by nine_k | 2025-08-22 20:37:28+00:00
> The rejection of renewable energy and turning back to coal is pure ideology, a macho rejection of environmentalism and wokeism.

To me, this sounds... naïve at best. Coal and especially oil are well-moneyed interests, and also important voting groups.

It's also an ideological, but not entirely nonsensical, fight against subsidizing industries. Which is not quite wise, at the time when China still seriously subsidizes solar and wind.
by foldr | 2025-08-22 20:37:38+00:00
The flip side of this is that convictions under the Communications Act have gone down compared to 2010, so it's a mixed picture:

https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...

It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
by spankalee | 2025-08-22 20:38:18+00:00
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what standards are here.

The web is what the engines implement and what sites use. Always has been. A standard that's not implemented isn't worth anything.

Web standards exist to help browsers be interoperable. Before them one browser would implement something, and if another liked it they would too. That can still happen, but standards mediate the process to be less chaotic and more reliable.

Web standards cannot force browsers to do anything. If a browser doesn't implement a standard - and there are lot of unimplemented "standards" out there - then it just doesn't.

As a user then you have the choice to use browsers that offer better or different standards support. If you require XSLT support, and Firefox removes it, you can use Safari, or Chrome. If Chrome removes it, you can hopefully use an Blink engine that keeps the feature on (usually they're removed with a flag far before they're actually deleted with code).

And this is the real problem with a lack of browser diversity: Users need to be able to vote with their feet.

But... if all the vendors agree on something, as a user good luck with finding an alternative. I seriously doubt Opera, Brave, or Vivaldi is going to do the work and take the security risk to add back XSLT. Servo and Ladybird aren't going to come to the rescue here either. They most likely would love to have less to implement.
by bhelkey | 2025-08-22 20:38:19+00:00
In the UK, ~55% of traffic comes from mobile [1]. The UK could approach Apple and Google and ask them to remove VPNs from their respective app stores when opened in the UK.

I imagine this would curtail a large proportion of mobile VPN usage.

Blocking desktop VPNs would be a bit more adhoc but it is possible to make it much harder for many people to download VPN clients.

[1] https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/mobile-vs-desktop...
by antichronology | 2025-08-22 20:39:22+00:00
We think that Orthrus can be applied in a bunch of ways to non-coding and coding RNA sequences but it's definitely fair we're a bit more focused on RNA sequences currently instead of non-coding parts of the genome like promoters and intergenic sequences.

For the data - Orthrus is trained on non experimentally collected data so our pre-training dataset is large by biological standards. It adds up to about 45 million unique sequences and assuming 1k tokens per sequence it's about 50b tokens.

We're thinking about this as large pre-training run on a bunch of annotation data from Refseq and Gencode in conjunction with more specialized Orthology datasets that are pooling data across 100s of species.

Then for specific applications we are fine tuning or doing linear probing for experimental prediction. For example we can predict half life using publicly available data collected by the awesome paper from: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

Or translation efficency: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39149337/

Eventually as we ramp up out wet lab data generation we're thinking about what does post-training look like? There is an RL analog here that we can use on these generalizable embeddings to demonstrate "high quality samples".

There are some early attempts at post-training in bio and I think it's a really exciting direction
by WJW | 2025-08-22 20:39:31+00:00
You can have an issue with that if you want, but I won't be joining you. Put up your own money (or time!) if you want to keep XSLT. Personally I think there are many better ways to spend money than on features nobody uses. Even just giving the money back to shareholders via buybacks or dividends would be better than doing useless work on purpose.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-08-22 20:39:41+00:00
There is no point of introducing yet another standard to do something that can be done in few lines of JS.

customElements.define( "html-include", class extends HTMLElement { connectedCallback() { fetch(this.getAttribute("href")) .then((response) => response.text()) .then((text) => (this.innerHTML = text))}});

The browser has had a powerful scripting language built in as a core primitive for decades, and yet people would rather create more standards to avoid using it for ideological reasons, and then complain that there aren't enough competing browsers.
by sunshine-o | 2025-08-22 20:40:24+00:00
By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.

If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.

This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
by mrguyorama | 2025-08-22 20:40:43+00:00
Uh no, Netflix runs a real business with real fundamentals and do things like invest in their content creation pipeline to provide their customers a better reason to stay, and their price to consumers is set by their costs and desired profit margin, and they have run a pretty straightforward business since the very beginning.

Uber successfully turned a war chest into a partial monopoly of all ride hailing for significant chunks of the world. That was the clear plan from the start, and was always meant to own the market so they could extract whatever rent they want.

Amazon reinvested heavily while competition floundered in order to literally own the market, and has spent every second since squeezing the market, their partners, everyone in the chain to extract ever more money from it.

None of those are even close to buying absurdly overpriced hardware from a monopoly and reselling access to that hardware for less than it costs to run and doing huge PR sweeps about how what you are building might kill everyone so we should obviously give them trillions in government dollars because if an American company isn't the one to kill everyone than we have failed.

"Not terribly knowledgeable in the field"?
by tom_ | 2025-08-22 20:41:12+00:00
If you used them when they were current, the emulator experience is never quite the same. The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT (and even now you're no longer 15-25 years old), and there's always at least a bit of sound latency. Also, you're using a modern keyboard and mouse.

On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect. CRTs, floppy disk drives, floppy disks, hard disk drives, key switches, mice with balls, aging capacitors, batteries, little plastic bits inside the keyboard that you didn't even realise were there until they crumbled into dust - they all go bad in the long run, and the repair always eats up at least a bit of time. (Even assuming it's actually repairable! Battery damage can be literally unfixable. Parts supply generally can be an issue. Mouldy floppy disks are time-consuming to rescue, and can damage the drives as you attempt it. Those little plastic keyboard bits are theoretically 3d printable, but you'll need to figure out what shape they were originally and how to glue them into place. And so on.)

The long-term prognosis for modern computers is uncertain too - but the nice thing about them is that you can always just buy another one. Turns out they're always making more of them!
by nphardon | 2025-08-22 20:41:15+00:00
I think the idea that it's important to know how to code is going to be seriously challenged. I know I feel like the learning process and insight I gain is important, but I wonder if it is, beyond the subjective.

Like I'm sure the grad students working for Euler learned a ton generating logarithmic tables by hand, but it proved to be useless in the end. Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be the same?

I think this is why obsolescence can be hard to predict.

Like if in 30 years all code is run and managed by ai bots, then all this debate about "it's important to know how to code!" will seem really silly.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-22 20:41:18+00:00
I have no idea what you just said. If I look up each of the words you just typed in the dictionary, they all have multiple meanings. Multiply that together, there are literally billions of combinations. There's no way for me to know which you meant.

In other words, to put the burden on the listener rather than the speaker to be clear about meaning, is bad communication.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-22 20:41:26+00:00
XML/XSLT is a huge mess of a code base to implement correctly - especially XML parsing has been a fruitful source of exploits in the past. And it's not used in practice these days, it's been ages since I saw that used on the web out of RSS/Atom feeds (which are practically dead, for better or worse) and Java-based CMSes.

So from a technical standpoint, I do understand those calling for it to be eventually removed.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-22 20:41:32+00:00
Ithaca high. That’s not a representative sample but my own N=10 or so of people I knew somewhere between rather well to very well. It is definitely a place where an NB could feel at home but it is also said to be the most expensive small city in the US.

I tend to tell LGBTQ+ people that they should not move here because in doing so they throw away their vote and drive up our cost of living, I think they should go to the bluest corner of the purplest state.
by brewmarche | 2025-08-22 20:41:44+00:00
Yeah I remember using BootCamp back then. FreeBSD also works quite well on the MacBook Air mid-2014, but without WiFi.

Edit: I didn’t bother to look into wifibox which is a FreeBSD package that runs a Linux VM for the WiFi driver, that could work. Also didn’t bother to check the webcam. However both WiFi and webcam work under various Linux distributions, but it’s typically a third-party Broadcom driver that has to be added outside of regular package repos.
by arp242 | 2025-08-22 20:41:53+00:00
Mate ... Your full comment:

"XSLT isn't a tool for surveillance capitalism, nor for glossy product brochure presentation, nor for captive passive doomscrolling video experiences, so it must be actively excised from the global knowledge network hypermedia standard"

If that's not saying "they're doing it because [..]" then I don't know what it's saying.
by anp | 2025-08-22 20:41:58+00:00
> you are a highly critical thinker and this is tempered by your self-doubt: you absolutely hate being wrong but you live in constant fear of it

Is there any work happening to model these kinds of emotional responses at a “lower level” than prompts?

I see work around like councils of experts and find myself wondering if some of those “experts” should actually be attempting to model things like survival pressure or the need to socially belong that many would normally consider to be non-rational behaviors.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-08-22 20:42:59+00:00
> Which programmer wants that?!

Agreed.

My LLM usage has quickly become a more efficient way to solve problems that basically require copy/pasting from some documentation I have to look up where me doing it myself is more error prone.

I was recently doing a fairly complex set of data transformations and understanding what the data means remained essential. AI tends to fail spectacularly at really understanding the nuances of data (that often requires understanding the underlying business logic generating the data).

However it's very useful when I have to do a bunch of window functions, where I can describe the operation but don't want to look up the syntax. Or just writing SQL when I can explain exactly what I need it to do.

Similarly working with Pytorch involves a fair bit of what I consider pseudo-boilerplate where the code itself is quite boring, but contains just enough complexity that it can't be simply automated away. Hand rolling this stuff often leads to small errors/bugs, but LLMs can do a spectacular job of quickly generating this, provided you do know exactly what you're looking to build.

What's interesting is that this has still been a major speed boost, because looking up how to do some tedious thing you just forgot how to do can really break flow.
by troupo | 2025-08-22 20:43:10+00:00
> Simple: xslt is a giant attack surface entirely in C, and no browser maintainer cares to expend resources on maintaining that

And yet they have no qualms shoving huge attack surfaces in the form of WebUSB, WebSerial, WebMIDI, WebTransport, WebBluetooth, WebKitchenSink, most of which have as much usage as XSLT: https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... or https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity...