MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eadmund | 2025-08-06 09:49:18+00:00
> Why use a new format instead of SVG or JS+canvas?

Because those are both hellaciously complex, and implementing a usable fraction of the functionality of either is not a job for a single hobbyist programmer. At least, I don’t think they are — I could be wrong. Even if I am, the number of programmers who can write code to draw a line given a JSON description has to be orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude larger than the number who can write an XML parser, an SVG implementation, a Javascript parser and runtime or a canvas implementation.
by ryao | 2025-08-06 09:49:20+00:00
At work, whenever we design hardware that uses Li-Ion cells, I always discuss safety before we even have done the design work so that we build something that is safe. Why did these guys not do that? Did they only learn about videos of li-ion explosions/fires after design this?

By the way, they probably should have used a LiFePo4 chemistry instead. It would not have the same runtime, but it would be much safer in worst case scenarios.
by ivanstepanovftw | 2025-08-06 09:49:57+00:00
The only out-of-GitHub interaction was as Zulip chat, where I asked maintainers to review and merge it [3], and another one to Ali, telling him my feelings about getting banned for closing my contributions, discussing further actions.

Two deleted messages on ZSF had this content:

> SPIR-V at master is still broken. I tried to help Zig. But PR never gets merged. I had to update it 3 times. It lasted for a month. I have updated all SPIR-V dependencies. You don't care about SPIR-V anyway, why I was threatened this way?

> Sorry for my contributions.

I was really disappointed when I wrote this, and I thought that nobody should see this to not harm maintainers and the project itself, so I deleted them. Then I got banned on Zulip without a reason.

I just wanted to make Zig closer to 1.0 release.

[3]: https://zsf.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/454360-compiler/to...
by ehnto | 2025-08-06 09:51:05+00:00
Much work is not "text in, text out", and much work is not digital at all. But even in the digital world, inserting an LLM into a workflow is just not always that useful.

In fact much automation, code or otherwise, benefits from or even requires explicit, concise rules.

It is far quicker for me to already know, and write, an SQL statement, than it is to explain what I need to an LLM.

It is also quite difficult to get LLMs into a lot of processes, and I think big enterprises are going to really struggle with this. I would absolutely love AI to manage some Windows servers that are in my care, but they are three VMs deep in a remote desktop stack that gets me into a DMZ/intranet. There's no interface, and how would an LLM help anyway. What I need is concise, discreet automations. Not a chat bot interface to try and instruct every day.

To be clear I do try to use AI most days, I have Claude and I am a software developer so ideally it could be very helpful, but I have far less use for it than say people in the strategy or marketing departments for example. I do a lot of things, but not really all that much writing.
by roncesvalles | 2025-08-06 09:51:17+00:00
The issue is that the 'B' is not very consequential.

Consider something like Shopify - someone with zero knowledge of programming can wow you with an incredible ecommerce site built through Shopify. It's probably like a 1000x efficiency improvement versus building one from scratch (or even using the popular lowcode tools of the era like Magento and Drupal). But it won't help you build Amazon.com, or even Nike.com. It won't even get you part of the way there.

And LLMs, while more general/expressive than Shopify, are inferior to Shopify at doing what Shopify does i.e. you're still better off using Shopify instead of trying to vibe-code an e-commerce website. I would say the same line of thinking extends to general software engineering.
by highfrequency | 2025-08-06 09:51:48+00:00
Careful not to automatically slip into a zero sum mindset - it is possible that low interest rates benefit everyone even if the benefits disproportionately go to one class over another. (Example: lowering interest rates after the Financial Crisis - certainly good for banks, but lowering unemployment is critical for normal people too).

In the same way that UBI would disproportionately benefit poor people, but considered with its downstream effects could benefit rich people too.
by camgunz | 2025-08-06 09:52:51+00:00
> PISA score is a form of grading, is it not?

No, it's an independent test. You can completely "fail" the PISA and it'll have no impact on your matriculation.

> I'm sure it doesn't just compare English proficiency between countries because some countries don't speak English at all and still get PISA score.

Correct. Students take the PISA in their native language. Only the most sparsely populated provinces in Canada did worse [0] than the UK [1] in 2018.

[0]: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/what-int...

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f20293fd3bf7...
by minznerjosh | 2025-08-06 09:53:17+00:00
I find it odd you included potatoes in the list of foods to give up. Boiled potatoes in particular rank at the very top of the satiety index[1], meaning they keep you full longer with less calories than other food (likely due to a combo of high water and fiber content.) I recently lost a modest 10 lbs and mashed potatoes (even with some added butter and milk) were a staple of my diet—keeping me from feeling hungry even at a calorie deficit.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/
by dleeftink | 2025-08-06 09:53:43+00:00
I'm reminded of how in the modular synthesis world Eurorack has standard 4U sizes but still allows other unit sizes to be fitted (e.g. 1U, 5U). Similarly, voltages and connections can be tweaked to your own content, as long as there exist appropriate adapters and converters in between.

We already have similar sofware development patterns, but I wonder what a Web API surface would look like when fully embracing a similar modular mindset.
by stopthe | 2025-08-06 09:54:30+00:00
Unfortunately, the choice of license likely won't matter in the nearest future (if not already so). If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace". And more unscrupulous players won't even bother with a rewrite, as we've seen recently in the case of Cheatingdaddy/Pickle.
by freefrog334433 | 2025-08-06 09:54:44+00:00
It also took 18 months to insert the people, set up the shell company, smuggle materials, manufacture, etc. It also had the advantage of surprise - the first such attack at such a distance from the front line. Is it unlikely such an attack will be replicated, just as a box-cutter hijack of 747s attack against buildings will not succeed again.
by Festro | 2025-08-06 09:55:18+00:00
Yet another waitlist for a tool with zero evidence that it can do anything it claims. Not even a UI screenshot, let alone workflows, or end-results.

It generates content? Show me examples. The site falls down at the first premise of 'show don't tell' marketing.

Reddit replier that is compliant with Reddit's policy of "Please don't: write bots that reply to comments or send private messages without solicitation." Tell me how that works.
by PJDK | 2025-08-06 09:56:01+00:00
Does it keep teasing a war with China - seems like China keeps teasing an attack on Taiwan and the US is deliberately ambiguous on how it would respond to such an attack.

I think all this talk of who would win often ignores that factor to. There is no realistic total war scenario between China and the US - China doesn't have any desire or capacity to role tanks into Washington and the US doesn't have any desire to role tanks into Beijing.

The war, if it comes will be China trying to take control of Taiwan and the US intervening on the side of Taiwan. Victory for China looks like Taiwan under PRC rule, victory for the US looks like Taiwanese independence.

With that in mind "all" the US needs to be able to do is make the cost of the invasion/maintaining the supply lines too high. If I was China the drones I might worry about the most would be underwater!
by dspillett | 2025-08-06 09:56:07+00:00
> IANAL, but AFAICS this leaves 2 options, switching the license or removing that dependency.

There is a third option: asking the project for an exception.

Though that is unlikely to be granted¹ leaving you back with just the other two options.

And of course a forth choice: just ignore the license. This is the option taken by companies like Onyx, whose products I might otherwise be interested in…

----

[1] Those of us who pick GPL3 or AGPL generally do so to keep things definite and an exception would muddy the waters, also it might not even be possible if the project has many maintainers as relicensing would require agreement from all who have provided code that is in the current release. Furthermore, if it has inherited the license from one of its dependencies, an exception is even less practical.
by dinfinity | 2025-08-06 09:56:14+00:00
Let's remember that the basic defense against model collapse is just not training on AI-generated and other crap data.

Sure, there are places where determining whether it is AI-generated or 'real' is hard, but there are plenty of places where the trust in the provider provides enough basis to include the data during curation. For example, it's not as if the NYT will suddenly start pumping out unchecked AI slop.

And then there is the enormous potential of data synthesized aided by, but not completely generated by AI and validated for accuracy through systematic means.
by lm28469 | 2025-08-06 09:56:31+00:00
Does anyone in these companies stops and thinks "wtf are we actually building" ? I feel like we're in a parody, even the previous VR hype cycle seemed somewhat serious in comparison

Like, why is one of the richest man on the planet getting all giggly presenting us "a fairy sloth in a magical forest"? https://imgur.com/1naGLfp
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-06 09:56:48+00:00
> OR, fusion. Microsoft is putting their bets on a sun in a bottle. If it works Solar and wind is dead.

I find this laughable. It is truly mental somersaults attempting to justify an insane policy.

On one hand we have an extremely complicated machine that does not exist yet with an unknown pathway to create electricity. With steam being too expensive.

On the other hand we outsource the complicated machine to the sun and passively collect the results with solar and wind power.

Good enough tends to beat imaginary perfect solutions.
by roenxi | 2025-08-06 09:56:56+00:00
Fortunately this is the software industry. We've got a lot of those autists and that automating urge is the best part about software. If someone don't like the idea of sitting around babysitting factories of machines they certainly shouldn't go into DevOps. It would be safest to just avoid programming in general, given how much of the industry centres on figuring out how to deploy huge amounts of computing power in an autonomous fashion.
by sfn42 | 2025-08-06 09:57:01+00:00
I feel like the word metabolism is often misunderstood. My metabolism is just the number of calories I need to maintain my weight. If I start being more active my metabolism increases, if I become less active it decreases.

So, metabolism is really just an expression of how active we are. Some athletes eat 5-10,000 calories a day just to maintain their weight. Hard working laborers also need a lot more calories than office workers.

Meanwhile, people blame their metabolism as if it's just a trait they can't control like their height. You absolutely can increase your metabolism, just move more. This is also likely a big reason why many people gain weight in adulthood - in school we have weekly gym classes and we spend lots of time running around ad playing with friends etc. Then we grow up and our activity level plummets, but we don't adjust our diet to accommodate our much lower metabolism.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-06 09:57:29+00:00
I did not want to argue in favor of AI-generated music (although of course, an artist can use any tool).

Regarding Händel, I think you are misunderstanding my argument.

What I meant is that, to my knowledge, his music was, at his times, a lot more pleasing to the popular tastes among his audience than, for example, Bach's.

The size or class of that audience was not my point, or that the production and commissioning of music was happening under different circumstances than today. I am well aware of that, and not sure why you think I wouldn't be.

In the end, there still was a metric of success, elite or not.

And it is simply not true that the main purpose of art is to "challenge". That can be a part of good art, but is not the primary purpose.

Art is also for enjoyment, by an audience (even if it is an elite audience), and also by the artist! I say that as a person who enjoys a lot of music that others might find obscure or unenjoyable.

But being "challenging" is not a value in itself. Twelve-tone music is as challenging as Freejazz or IDM or baroque music, all in different ways.

Some art is "challenging", but still artistically uninteresting and uninspired.

I was not making an argument for AI-generated slop, I was making an argument against ungrounded snobbery in defining what "art" is.

The societal circumstances you describe are not changing anything about my point. Among the wealthy, Händel was famous and a "crowd-pleaser" (for the wealthy elites, the royals, the clerical elites, it doesn't make a difference here), not a "challenger".

That was my point.

There was a discussion of "E-Musik" vs "U-Musik" recently on here, when a list was posted that reduced electronic music to Stockhausen and academic electroacoustic music.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-_und_U-Musik

There is no translation of these German terms, as far as I know. But that's no loss.

It attempts to split music into "serious music" and "entertainment".

"E-Musik" was meant to differentiate classical music from music aimed at being easy to listen to. And while efforts to create new "E-musik" in the 20th century led to some interesting music and experimentation, it also led to the funding of loads of boring snobbery (in my ears).

It's a good example for what I consider wrong about the definition I was answering to.
by JetSpiegel | 2025-08-06 09:58:25+00:00
That argument means ethnic cleansing is justified, if the people are not killed.

The governments are strictly limited in closing borders, not all the rest: closing universities, buying up all the media, choosing patsies as judges. Funny how the EU can void a referendum in Greece, but is "powerless" against backsliding democracy, one of the requirements for new countries to join in.

There's also the language barrier: if an Hungarian wants to abandon his home and start their life elsewhere, they better speak German, Polish, whatever.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-06 09:59:16+00:00
Is 20% on railroad actually crazy? We spend 20% on make-work for the healthcare industry.

In a majority agrarian economy where a lot of output doesn't go toward GDP (e.g. milking your own damn cow to feed milk to your own damn family won't show up) I would expect "new hotness" booms to look bigger than they actually are.
by aredox | 2025-08-06 09:59:49+00:00
>The satellite actually performed a lot better than anyone was expecting, becoming the "gold standard" in space-based carbon dioxide measurements.

>"The mission has also uncovered insights into CO2 emissions from cities, and contributes data supporting the Paris Agreement," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory adds. "As an unexpected bonus, OCO-2 has even been able to track growing seasons and crops by measuring the 'glow' plants emit when they photosynthesize."

>Data produced by the satellite has been used to create maps of photosynthesis on Earth, providing useful data to farmers as well as scientists, as they monitor farmland, crop yield, and drought.

https://www.iflscience.com/this-is-illegal-nasa-reportedly-o...
by hejsansvejsan | 2025-08-06 10:00:02+00:00
There's nothing subtle about the mistake in the paper at hand. The reason everybody expects proving P != NP to be difficult is that it's very hard to say anything at all about arbitrary programs. The authors just assume without justification that any program that solves SAT must operate in a certain recursive way -- obvious rubbish. It's hard to overstate how embarrassing this is for the Springer journal where this nonsense is published.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-06 10:00:07+00:00
> R&D was required not only to create initial versions, but also to increase scale.

Not to increase scale, but to reduce the cost of the device while maintaining 99% of the previous version, IOW, enshittification of the product.

> how would the affordable versions exist today?

Not all "affordability" comes from the producer of the said stuff. Many things are made from commodity materials, and producers of these commodity materials want to increase their profits, hence trying to produce "cheaper" versions of them, not for the customers, but for themselves.

Affordability comes from this cost reduction, again enshittification. Only a few companies I see produce lower priced versions of their past items which also surpasses them in functionality and quality.

e.g. I have Sony WH-CH510 wireless headphones, which has way higher resolution than some wired headphones paired with decent-ish amps, this is because Sony is an audiovisual company, and takes pride in what they do. On the other end of the spectrum is tons of other brands which doesn't sell for much cheaper, but get way worse sound quality and feature set, not because they can't do it as good as Sony, but want to get a small pie of the said market and earn some free money, basically.
by riedel | 2025-08-06 10:00:44+00:00
Actually I wonder, why in general not more decoders are just put into webassembly and are actually kept 'hot' on demand. Couldn't this also be an extension? Wouldn't that reduce the attack surface? I remember a time when most video and flash was a plugin. People would download the stuff. On the other hand using a public CDN at least would keep the traffic down for the one hosting the website.
by halgir | 2025-08-06 10:00:57+00:00
I agree you shouldn't use LLMs to produce material wholesale, but I think it can be positively useful when used thoughtfully.

I recently taught a high school equivalent philosophy class, and wanted to design an exercise for my students to allocate a limited number of organs to recipients that were not directly comparable. I asked an LLM to generate recipient profiles for the students to choose between. First pass, the recipients all needed different organs, which kind of ruined the point of the dilemma! I told it so, and second pass was great.

Even with the extra handholding, the LLM made good materials faster than if I would have designed them manually. But if I had trusted it blindly, the materials would have been useless.
by cesaref | 2025-08-06 10:01:00+00:00
And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.

One other model that can also work well is to dual license as GPL + commercial, so people who want to publish their work can use the GPL license but you can potentially fund the project from license sales to closed source users using the commercial licensing option. I see this a fair bit in the audio community I work within.
by user____name | 2025-08-06 10:01:28+00:00
I think he caved in to the pressure from outside because his company was sinking and financially underwater.

> One thing to keep in mind here is that the CEO didn't hide the flaws to make a profit

Didn't they try to hide the fact that they had to recast the entire hull because the previous one had too many structural deficiencies? I mean, they were monitoring all the tears all the time and had several test hulls crack in the R&D phase.

He probably just thought he could take the gamble, thread the needle and come out victorious, the way SpaceX almost bankrupted before going to bigger things, and his financing issues would melt away. High risk tollerance and wishful thinking.
by KaiserPro | 2025-08-06 10:01:41+00:00
I'm sorry but that is utter utter bullshit.

China is an exporting and manufacturing powerhouse. Something that is only accelerating. Don't get me wrong, china has a whole bunch of issues. but currently political instability kneecaping economic growth is not one of them.

Also China knows that unemployment means the end of their control. So they will do anything and everything to keep people gainfully employed. the USA less so, and we'll see if that works out for them.

Russia has a tiny economy based on war and oil.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-08-06 10:02:16+00:00
I think the problem with Intel's foundry is that it cannot produce the same quality and quantity at the level of TSMC.

I was looking through the list of fabrication technology for the latest CPUs, and while they say they are 3nm, it is using TSMCs technology (Arrow Lake S: Fabrication process: Compute Tile (Contains the CPU cores) TSMC's N3B node.)

My guess is that Trump is trying to save Intel by forcing TSMC to buy them under the guise of "I'm forcing companies invest in the US".
by myself248 | 2025-08-06 10:03:15+00:00
I bring this up constantly, even to the point of trying to figure out if US states can have "embassies" in other US states.

I was once advised to take a vacation to California every year and do all my thinking then. But I hate wasting fuel, and it'd be so much more fun to say "this little park in the middle of Detroit is actually California soil", and just walk down there every few weeks with my notepad, and ponder what problems need solving and how.
by aredox | 2025-08-06 10:03:39+00:00
>the data it puts out is coaxed into a model, which provide us with nothing we don't already know from ground based instrumentation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio... :

>That's because measuring carbon dioxide with instruments in various locations on the Earth's surface, as scientists have been doing since the 1950s, doesn't provide information about the whole planet. Satellite data, on the other hand, covers the entire Earth.

And that data showed some surprising things. "Fifty years ago we thought the tropical forests were like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking up carbon dioxide," Denning explains. "Now we know they're not."
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-06 10:04:13+00:00
This is interesting because it was the reversal of prosperity overall due to the spiraling inflation of the 1970's that caused the defunding responsible for the pivot toward financialization and away from academic excellence.

Like the vast majority, everyone had to focus more on financial survival than was ever imaginable before, and this permeated the universities also and was never recovered from. This is when the reliance on foreign students began to skyrocket too.
by npteljes | 2025-08-06 10:04:28+00:00
Yeah, basically MIT is "more open" in the short term, while GPL is more open on the long term. GPL, while restricting some freedoms right now, is actually enabling the remaining freedoms to be sustainable in the future. Very similar to how law enforcement works out with regards to a sustainable society, and how market restrictions work out to create a sustainable and diverse market.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-06 10:05:01+00:00
> All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not.

You’re quite far out of your depth here.

The science has concluded that renewables decrease electricity costs. But comparing regions the ones that went straight into renewables were the ones with nearly 100% fossil fuel usage which were desperate for alternatives.

They started with expensive electricity and fossil fuels still often are the marginal producer in their systems.

And don’t get me started on investing in nuclear power taking 20 years to build and delivering $170-250/MWh electricity today. That is pure lunacy to propose.