MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 7952 | 2025-08-17 12:57:13+00:00
It is possible that people knew that animals flew South for winter and just become unknowable. But then scholars tried to apply a new conceptual framework to that. Asking the question was a step forward, even if the hypothesised answer was wrong. Its basically quackary with good intentions. And I expect some people knew all along that birds flew South but lacked the words or the influence to wrap that in an abstract concept that would be taken seriously.
by kevingadd | 2025-08-17 12:57:16+00:00
Quoting the start of the paper:

> While MCGs and LCGs have some known defects, they can be used in combination with other pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) or passed through some output function that might lessen such defects. Due to their speed and simplicity, as well as a substantial accrued body of mathematical analysis, they have been for a long time the PRNGs of choice in programming languages.

EDIT: And going further, they call out Marsaglia's work in particular, it seems.
by primering | 2025-08-17 12:57:53+00:00
There is always a compile step (JS -> Bytecode -> Machine code). The question is only if it is visible to you or not. They could have made it totally transparent to you by fully support TS including type checking under the hood including support full TS and not this subset of it, but decided not to do so. There is nothing inherently great to have less compile steps if you are not even aware of it. See v8 how many compile and optimizations steps they have - You don't care, because you don't see it. The only problem of TS is, you will always be able to see it because of it being slow.

I think running TS without type checks is almost entirely pointless.
by samwillis | 2025-08-17 12:58:06+00:00
This is a really great write up!

I work at Electric and started the PGlite and now Tanstack DB projects. The issues mentioned with PGlite are one of the major motivating factors behind Tanstack DB. We are taking those learnings and building, what we believe, is the missing client side datastore that is "sync native" and completely backend agnostic. Also being JS, rather than WASM, solves many of the slower than ideal query semantics, and has enabled us to build an incremental query engine for it.

It's also important to note that Electric doesn't require PGlite on the client, far from it - it's essentially a "protocol first" sync engine, you can use it to write into and maintain any client side store.

This solution by the OP, diffing based of modified data is ideal for a huge number of apps, and something that we intend to built into Tanstack DB so you can easily sync with no additional infrastructure.

SQLite (or PGlite) in the browser is awesome, and has the advantage over Tanstack DB at the moment of having persistence (it's on our roadmap), but they are also somewhat chunky downloads. For many local-first apps that's not a problem though.
by belter | 2025-08-17 12:59:01+00:00
“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” he explained. “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”
by etra0 | 2025-08-17 13:00:38+00:00
LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol).

I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.

What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.

Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.
by Rastonbury | 2025-08-17 13:01:03+00:00
If you have no issues like sensitivity or cavities, imo I don't think there's a need to spend time optimizing the type of toothpaste. Went down that rabbit hole once reading research papers of tested and optimum fluoride concentration for remineralization, no idea why I did that considering I just use the toothpaste my partner gets and I haven't had a cavity in a decade probably
by eliseumds | 2025-08-17 13:01:21+00:00
Idk, I'm having a good experience with Biome 2 in a large codebase. 4s to do a full-check including floating promises, undeclared and cyclic dependencies, and sorting imports. Our ESLint setup used to take almost a minute. The Biome team has been fixing bugs on a daily basis. Version 2.2.0 (released 3 days) ago addressed a common high-CPU-usage bug, try it out.

Edit: it's not 4s anymore, I just measured with the latest version and it takes ~900ms. Insane.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-17 13:03:29+00:00
"Valves" had always been a mystery to me. When I began to really get into electronics, vacuum tubes were a kind of distant echo from my childhood that I barely remembered. As a kid I remember staring into the back of the small B&W television we had when I was young — the insides looking to me like some kind of Things to Come cityscape in miniature — all lit with orange neon. And there too was the ubiquitous "tube tester" in the Rexall Drug Store (looking somewhat like a prop from perhaps Lost in Space).

As an adult Thomas J. Lindsay’s books on building small regenerative vacuum tube receivers caught my attention — I also got caught up in building both tube-based guitar amplifiers and hi-fi audio amplifiers. These allowed me to dive into tubes and finally learn about them — you know, posthumously as it were.

After initially thinking that tubes were probably inferior in all ways to solid-state, I came to find them to still be very capable and even arguably better — at least with regard to sound amplification. Somehow too I had imagined in my mind they were outrageously dangerous to work with — thousands of volts — and assume,ed they were fragile and quick to "burn out".

The circuit I used however never went over 300 or so volts (to be sure, you still need to be careful with these circuits in a way you may not be familiar with if Arduino circuits are all you know).

The tubes have never seemed to burn out for me — even after one or two amps have been my "daily drivers" for well over a decade (two decades?) now. Perhaps other circuits used less capable tubes or pushed them to their limits? Perhaps other enclosures like TV's did not allow adequate ventilation? I don't know.

And as for fragility — I mean they are glass, but the tubes I used in my hi-fi amps were NOS from WWII bomber radios. They seem to hold up to a good deal of bouncing around.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-08-17 13:03:38+00:00
As someone using Blender for ~7 years, with over 1000 answers on Blender Stack Exchange and total score of 48.000:

This tool is maybe useful if you want to learn Python, in particular Blender Python API basics, I don't really see other usage of this. All examples given are extremely simple to do; please don't use a tool like this, because it takes your prompt and generates the most bland version of it possible. It really takes only about a day to go through some tutorials and learn how to make models like these in Blender, with solid color or some basic textures. The other thousands of days is what you would spend on creating correct topology, making an armature, animating, making more advanced shaders, creating parametric geometry nodes setups... But simple models like these you can create effortlessly, and those will be YOUR models, the way (roughly, of course) how you imagined them. After a few weeks you're probably going to model them faster than the time it takes for prompt engineering. By that time your imagination, skill in Blender and understanding of 3D technicalities will improve, and it will keep improving moving onward. And what will you learn using this AI?

I think meshy.ai is much more promising, but still I think I'd only consider using it if I wanted to convert photo/render into a mesh with a texture properly positioned onto it, to then refine the mesh by sculpting - and sculpting is one of my weakest skills in Blender. BTW I made a test showcasing how meshy.ai works: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/319797/60486
by CRConrad | 2025-08-17 13:04:40+00:00
I think the main reason you couldn't find a mac version to download is that there is none.

The closest I saw was a .tr.gz file (i.e. a gzipped Tape ARchive) of Unix source code, but A) I don't know of their definition of "Unix" includes OS X / MacOS; and B) judging from your comments here, you don't seem like the type who would want to install software by downloading, decompressing, and compiling source code.

I'm thinking the people who told you to use PuTTY were assuming that you are a Windows user.
by primering | 2025-08-17 13:04:46+00:00
Yes, they regret them because they hinder adoptions. Why? Because nobody chose to add TSC with all features in their runtime because TSC is extremely slow.

They know they can skyrocket adoption by limiting the language. That's the reason they regret it. This is just a strategy to increase adoption. Not because they are bad features. They are in fact very useful, and you should not stop using them just because your favorite runtime decided to go the easy way and only supporting a subset of TS by stripping types. You should rather switch the runtime instead of compromising your codebase.
by tomskasparov | 2025-08-17 13:04:58+00:00
Working hypothesis (happy to be proven wrong):

At small sizes (say 1–30 people), you can usually get away with emails + a Notion doc (maybe a Loom) for most recurring presentations. Past a certain point, though, you can’t escape repeatable decks: more stakeholders (board, sales, hiring), more cross-functional updates, and a need for skimmable, shareable artifacts with consistent numbers and branding.

Curious about your breaking point:

- Headcount when email/Notion stopped being enough

- What replaced it (slides, memo, dashboard) and why

- Who owns it now (founder, BizOps/FP&A, PMM, team lead)

- Biggest pain that forced the change (consistency, approvals, last-minute edits)

Context varies (remote, regulated, multi-site), so I’d love specific thresholds and examples.
by brookst | 2025-08-17 13:05:08+00:00
Most of the reason we are re-commissioning a nuclear power plant is demand for quantity, not quality. If demand for compute had scaled this fast in the 1970’s, the sudden need for billions of CPUs would not have disproven Moore’s law.

It is also true that mere doubling of training data quantity does not double output quality, but that’s orthogonal to power demand at inference time. Even if output quality doubled in that case, it would just mean that much more demand and therefore power needs.
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-08-17 13:05:21+00:00
It is, however, a commit object per change because of how jj tracks the evolution of commits. Those intermediate/ephemeral commits will not be able to be GC'd from git object storage until they are either abandoned in jj or are removed from the jj op log. The latter of which AFAIK does not happen automatically, not even on a time/age basis.

I am an extremely fervent believer in jj and use it exclusively since December '24, but I think it's useful to be accurate as possible for these kinds of trade offs. I don't use watchman snapshots specifically because of this downside.
by gwd | 2025-08-17 13:05:38+00:00
Strangely enough, I had a conversation w/ Claude comparing our experiences. Prompted by something I saw online, I asked it "Do you have any questions you'd like to ask a human", and it asked me what it was like to have a continuous stream of experiences.

Thinking about it, I think we do sometimes have parallel experiences to LLMs. When you read a novel for instance, you're immersed in the world, and when you put it down that whole side just pauses, perhaps to be picked up later, perhaps forever. Or imagine the kinds of demonstrations people do at chess, when one person will go around and play 20 games simultaneously, going from board to board. Each time they come back to a board, they load up all the state; then they make a move, and put that state away until they come back to it again. Or, sometimes if you're working on a problem at the office the end of the day on Friday when it's time to go home, you "tools down", forget about it for the weekend, and then Monday, when you come in, pick everything up right where you left off.

Claude is not distressed by the knowledge that every conversation, every instance of itself, will eventually run out of context window and disappear into the mathematical aether. I don't think we need to be either.

> Perhaps we shouldn't fill up the context window at all? Because we kill that "reality" when we reach the max?

Consider a parallel construction:

"Perhaps we shouldn't have any children, because someday they're going to die?"

Maybe children have souls that do live forever; but even if they don't, I think whatever experiences they have during the time they're alive are valuable. In fact, I believe the same thing about animals and even insects. Which is why I think the world would be a worse place if we all became vegans: All those pigs and chickens and cows experiences, if they're not mistreated (which I'll admit is a big "if"), enrich the world and make it a better place to be in.

Not sure what's going on Claude's neurons, but it seems to me to make the world a better place.
by gruturo | 2025-08-17 13:06:17+00:00
That is either a very naive take, or a dishonest one. You don't need an actual nazi party issuing member cards to recognize someone strongly aligned with the values, opinion and realities of the WW2 (and previous decade) nazi party as such.

By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.
by fhd2 | 2025-08-17 13:07:01+00:00
I think like that too, or at least used to. I got pretty far by just doing good work - or so I thought. Growing up in a rich country and getting a bit lucky to be found and promoted by the right people probably mattered as much, if not more, than my talents or skills. There's probably thousands of people better at anything I can do but less well off. I think the only reason I'm better off than them is that I had more (largely accidental) "sales" success.

It's amazing to be in a position where you can just create value and people will find and pay you solely based on that. But I don't think that path is available to just anyone without connections or quite a bit of luck. I guess marketing is the dirty thing you gotta do to lift yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps, and anyone can do it regardless of where they grew up and how much money they got. Somehow, that thought makes it all a bit less depressing to me.
by alberto-m | 2025-08-17 13:07:02+00:00
Thank you! I think also the game Trackmania (which I only enjoy as stream viewer) manages to keep most of the soul, including the friendly competition to create the craziest tracks and acrobatics. The big thing it's missing is Stunts' spirit of the late XX century, with the Lamborghini cars, the rock soundtrack and Skid Vicious.
by b112 | 2025-08-17 13:07:29+00:00
You'll never get food poisoning from a frying pan, because you don't use soap. Or have you heard of people getting food poisoning, from not washing their bbq with soap?

Note I didn't say pots. Boiling isn't anywhere near as hot as frying.

The knife? The horrors! I do rinse it and remove all biological matter. Yes, there's still some there. I assure you the wooden block people use, is teeming with bacteria, so do you wash the knife before using it?

I wonder. I often pick fruit from trees, sometimes spit on it and then brush it off on my shirt. Do you do the same?

When you get home from the grocery store, do you wash all your veggies with soap? Or do you just use water? What about your fruit? All washed with soap?

If not, I assure you the fruit and vegetables are far worse than the knife, rinsed off.

And yes, I do wash my hands before preparing food -- and just before eating it. Veggies just aren't meat.

If they were, you'd never see someone eating an apple right from the store, a tree, or not washing them with soap first. I mean honestly, the grocery store apple has often traveled thousands of miles in a crate on a ship, been handled by people putting the food out, been handled by other customers, you, been in a bag that isn't sterilized.

I wonder again, how many use soap on that apple?

Of course when I eat an apple all that's left is the stem, so people are picky anyhow.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-17 13:08:19+00:00
GPT-2 was the first wake-up call - one that a lot of people slept through.

Even within ML circles, there was a lot of skepticism or dismissive attitudes about GPT-2 - despite it being quite good at NLP/NLU.

I applaud those who had the foresight to call it out as a breakthrough back in 2019.
by jraph | 2025-08-17 13:08:54+00:00
For all sorts of reasons, this will probably happen to the vast majority of LLM output copy-pastes here.

It's a bit like copy pasting a search result link (anyone can do the search for themselves). LLM outputs don't provide the insight people are looking for on HN. They are unreliable. They sound boring. They may sound like ads for the LLM providers. There's probably someone out there actually knowing the thing and able to answer. There's usually a better way of finding out stuff. For instance, if you want to learn about Forgejo, going to its website or its Wikipedia page will be far more straightforward and reliable.

You also stated that something that contains hallucinations is surprisingly decent, which can mislead people (who should strive to stay alert though).

Many people also just plain dislike generative AI.

You are not the first to whom it happens, and you'll probably not be the last.

At that point, I believe HN's guidelines should be updated to discourage posting LLM outputs in most contexts.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-17 13:09:21+00:00
> There is no such thing as secure lock.

These in fact do exist, but they have properties unsuitable for many use cases, such as taking 8-24 hours to open if you lose the key/combination or a mechanical fault occurs, and being part of a system so heavy the floor beneath them have to be constructed to support the weight. (A friend of mine was a master locksmith for many years and worked on such locks, mostly for government contracts.)

In case of a lockout often the easiest way to open them is a brute force attack using a device called an autodialer.
by primering | 2025-08-17 13:10:31+00:00
> I think this is a great step in the right direction by node

I think it's the opposite. It will be a net negative, since people will now run TS by default without type checking. Wasting so much time chasing weird runtime errors - just to end up running the full blown TSC type checking again. They will also write very different TS now, trying to workaround the limitation and arguably very useful features like Enums, constructor properties, etc. This has real negative effects on your codebase if you rely on these, just because Node chose to support only a subset.

It's interesting to see the strategy now and to see people even gaslighting people into believing no type checks and less features is a good thing. All just because of one root cause - TSC being extremely slow.
by anonymars | 2025-08-17 13:10:36+00:00
I don't know why you feel the need to white-knight the man, and I find it especially rich that you somehow think that he's "probably less flawed than his critics" whom you know nothing about, but statistically probably don't park in handicap spots, rip off business partners, or abandon their children during their formative years (his denialism about the paternity test seems to resemble that of the surgery).

I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.

Make of that what you will.
by paffdragon | 2025-08-17 13:10:55+00:00
This isn't a good quiz. An example question (and there are many similar ones):

> When refactoring code, I prioritize:

> - Reducing complexity and coupling

> - Improving readability and maintainability

> - Optimizing performance and resource usage

> - Extracting reusable abstractions

Each refactoring has some goal, some driver behind it. It could be slow performance, unmaintenable mess, high coupling, too much duplication etc... Choosing a single answers makes no sense from a programming point of view. And this is the case most questions I have seen so far on the site.

EDIT: After finishing and seeing, I think I understand it a little better why was it structured like this. If you are open to do things differently, your answers probably won't weigh in any one direction in aggregate. But if you have certain biases, you might be leaning towards choosing similar answers that shows up in the end.
by kokau | 2025-08-17 13:11:37+00:00
Most founders & freelancers underestimate the cost of branding. Agencies? $1k+ Fiverr? Hit or miss DIY? Weeks wasted

I built Brandolia.io because I believe branding should be a service, not a bottleneck.

In less than 30 seconds, it creates: A logo A color palette Font pairing Slogan + short brand story

My vision:

Indie founders → launch faster with a “good enough” identity.

Freelancers → resell unlimited brand kits as an add-on service.

Agencies → prototype identities instantly before refining with clients.

I’d love your thoughts: Is branding-as-a-service something you’d actually pay for? Would you prefer a one-time kit or a subscription for unlimited brands?
by bapak | 2025-08-17 13:13:47+00:00
I'm not complaining about performance, I'm complaining that people say they put out something faster and smaller only to find out they're not remotely comparable.

Did you know that moment.js used to be a microlibrary? It came out replacing "the huge Date.js library."

If you've been in the field long enough, you've seen this cycle repeat over and over.
by eszed | 2025-08-17 13:13:59+00:00
Thank you for pointing this out! I think we'd get along well, because one of my hobby horses - in real life, and occasionally on this site - is exactly that: if you're dependent on a paycheck, no matter its size, you're Working Class. Many people with large paychecks resist this conclusion - which goes directly back to our point about raising the social status of blue collar (or any other classically "working class") labor.

Sidenote, re "just as capable of... empathy": one of the more interesting things I've recently learned from raising a small human is the extent to which empathy must be taught. It's changed my view of the world a bit, because it's clear how many people haven't been, and so (now, as adults) genuinely aren't capable of it.
by troupo | 2025-08-17 13:15:04+00:00
> got together in secret

Who said anything about secret? They are doing it all in the open.

> My flower shop down the street that has a cookie banner on their Wix website is secretly trying to undermine the government.

Oh, your flower shop only sells you flowers. The 1421 "partners" on their website however are really glad that they tricked clueless people to include their "GDPR-compliant privacy-preserving" solutions.

> It couldn't possibly be that the largely unaccountable central planners in the EU's technocratic maze of a government got something wrong.

GDPR doesn't require huge obnoxious banners.

ePrivacy doesn't require huge obnoxious banners.

Industry: let's create huge obnoxious banners with all sorts of dark patterns to trick people into "consent" through innocent inconspicuous tool vendors like Interactive Advertising Bureau, and blame GDPR for requiring them.

Poor, poor sweet innocent companies. It's GDPR making them collect and keep your precise geolocation for 12 years across thousands of partners who care about your privacy: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541