MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brazzy | 2025-08-22 06:51:44+00:00
This project is a poster child for the Japanese "bubble economy" of the 1980s, the economical and even cultural impact of which cannot be overstated.

In William Gibson's Neuromancer, Japan is the Land of the Future, where all the exciting technological development happens. That was a direct result of the bubble, which enabled extreme and often irrational investment in R&D as well as ambitious real estate projects like this, which must have been started at the height of the bubble - but opened a year after it burst in 1992.

It had seemed at the time like Japan was set to take over the world. And then reality hit: many of the investments never stood a chance of turning a profit. Like a gigantic indoor resort, absurdly expensive to build and run, but "saddled in one of Japan's poorest prefectures", which at its best got one fifth of the visitors it would have needed to be profitable.

After 1992, Japanese property prices fell for 18 years straigh, and the Nikkei didn't get back to its 1990 high until 2023!
by ath3nd | 2025-08-22 06:53:20+00:00
> I can't give 2 cents about the growth of such a black mirror -esque company

I would donate my two cents or even more to witness their downfall though. I left WhatsApp years ago, and haven't used any of their other services like fb or Instagram. I don't want to contribute to a company that actively helped a couple of genocides (Myanmar), help elect a dictator or two (Philippines) and spread racist propaganda and, most recently, allowing women to be called 'personal objects'.

Their tech is far from impressive, their products are far from impressive, the only impressive thing is that they are still in business.
by zenlot | 2025-08-22 06:53:52+00:00
Your choices are modern. Not sure what the person arguing exactly about, but new C# is as modern as it can be, and .ts is pretty damn modern as well. Same for deno in 2025.

In fact, in 2025 I tested same setup for better scripts: deno+ts.

I know .ts pretty ok, but the pattern didn't stick to me with deno, especially when Python received uv.

But both options are fine. Saying that in 2025 you should so something different and more modern and not elaborating makes 0 of an argument.

PS C#/.NET just introduced "run", won't be much sense to use deno+ts once it gets up to speed as native integration.
by senko | 2025-08-22 06:54:09+00:00
I am assuming integrating over all possible configurations would be a component of The Total Perspective Vortex.

After all, Feynman showed this is in principle possible, even with local nondeterminism.

(this being a text medium with a high probability of another commenter misunderstanding my intent, I must end this with a note that I am, of course, BSing :)
by bn-l | 2025-08-22 06:55:20+00:00
This is blowing my mind.

I think the tamagotchi also did this and I can’t believe I never made the connection there.

People will put protective cases on them, and the way they’re held, it’s sort of like they’re being cradled.

It’ll scream every now and then when it needs your attention. And then you pick it up and it soothes you and the device (the notifications on iOS automatically decrease in volume when you’re looking at the screen).
by Dilettante_ | 2025-08-22 06:55:29+00:00
The examples look a lot better than what I'm seeing in my own attempts and on the "Wall of QRs", I wonder if it's just because we're not using "High Res" or if there's some fine-tuning of the source-image involved.

In any case, this is massively cool. Did you see that little egg fella? He's got sunglasses and everything.
by adrr | 2025-08-22 06:55:47+00:00
Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.

1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...

2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...
by lrvick | 2025-08-22 06:56:16+00:00
CRTs are literally particle accelerators smashing electrons into phosphors with high enough accuracy to make human recognizable images. And this was not just at some university science lab. We mass produced this crazy shit and put it in most homes on planet earth as new campfire our families would gather around, replacing primitive transistor radios.

And now people just leave these displays of humanities wildest engineering capabilities... on the side of the road. There is not a factory left on the planet with the experience or equipment to make them anymore, and these tubes have a limited lifespan.

I recently setup 30+ game consoles in my garage, along with a modular a/v synth and switchboard equipment and 30+ CRT TVs of every size ever mass produced in a big amorphous blob floor to ceiling. No one else wants these beautiful things? MORE FOR ME :D

It is glorious, and as a security engineer it is how I detox and remember that I actually do enjoy playing with technology when it does not require user tracking or the internet to function.
by imiric | 2025-08-22 06:57:13+00:00
The issue is not with how code looks. It's with what it does, and how it does it. You don't have to be an "artisan" to notice the issues moi2388 mentioned.

The actual difference is between people who care about the quality of the end result, and the experience of users of the software, and those who care about "shipping quickly" no matter the state of what they're producing.

This difference has always existed, but ML tools empower the latter group much more than the former. The inevitable outcome of this will be a stark decline of average software quality, and broad user dissatisfaction. While also making scammers and grifters much more productive, and their scams more lucrative.
by amarcheschi | 2025-08-22 06:57:48+00:00
For an uni course I tried to fine tune Gemma in a few days, it wasn't easy because tutorials often were written with old version of hf libraries that now work differently, there's a lot of areas to improve, everything still seems kinda fresh and so it's a pain in the ass to deviate from simple walkthroughs to something tailored to your needs.
by unwind | 2025-08-22 06:57:56+00:00
Larger stores in Sweden also use the coin system, even though as in the Netherlands it feels like use is declining in favor of just unlocked carts.

My favorite part of the system in larger stores is that to handle people not carrying cash (Sweden is pretty long-gone in this regard), you can usually go inside the store to get a free plastic token that fits the reader.

That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back, so by replacing your money with a free plastic token that they hand out from a basket, they did .. something to the overall system design.

Still fun as an example of how the customer's overall experience is more important than the point of an entire security system, I think.
by bhasinanant | 2025-08-22 06:59:19+00:00
Agree with a lot here. QR Codes have however become a cornerstone of digital convenience in a lot of the world. All the more true here in India, where basically everything is using QR Codes, from payments to restaurant menus. People here are still not used to using Lens + OCR. Then, there are issues like long links or confusing zeroes and O's. QR Codes solve these pretty well, I believe.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-22 06:59:50+00:00
There was this recent post about a Cloudflare OAuth client where the author checked in all the AI prompts, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166.

The author of the library (kentonv) comments in the HN thread that he said it took him a few days to write the library with AI help, while he thinks it would have taken weeks or months to write manually.

Also, while it may be technically true we're "two years in", I don't think this is a fair assessment. I've been trying AI tools for a while, and the first time I felt "OK, now this is really starting to enhance my velocity" was with the release of Claude 4 in May of this year.
by masklinn | 2025-08-22 07:00:55+00:00
I’m sure you’re a old man on the verge of death who loves yelling at clouds but enforcement and application of consistent code formatting has been considered a basic part of project management for a while now. Recent langage provide it as part of core project management tooling.

Given uv is openly strongly inspired by cargo and astral also has tooling for code formatting, the integration was never a question of “if”.
My first project in Go is a terminal dashboard (what a programming language)
by vinserello | 2025-08-22 07:01:28+00:00
Just wrapped up my first Go project and wow, what a language. I'm a WebDev but I studied both C and C++: Go feels like the smart, minimalist cousin that cuts the fluff but keeps the power.

- Compilation is instant - Syntax is clean and predictable - The tooling is chef's kiss (go run for example)

To test the waters, I built something fun:

Datacmd that is a CLI tool that turns CSV/JSON/API data into beautiful terminal dashboards with a single command.

No GUI. Just pure terminal magic:

datacmd --generate --source=data.csv Supports pie charts, gauges, tables, live system metrics, and it's built on top of termdash.

I see termdash was missing pie charts, tables and radar chart, so I tried implementing myself.

GitHub: github.com/VincenzoManto/datacmd Feedback and PRs welcome (probably there a lot of bugs), I’d love to grow this into a go-to tool for devs who live in the terminal.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-22 07:02:55+00:00
It's a minor issues in teams where people use inconsistent formatting. This causes needless complications when merging code and additional work related to resolving conflicts that shouldn't exist to begin with.

Some languages (Go, Rust) have essentially solved this issue to the point where blindly running the formatters these languages have solves the problem and is uncontroversial.

Sadly, the language of choice for me (Kotlin) has a big unaddressed problem here where what the IDE does for formatting and what independent formatting tools do are two things that are hard to align for mostly the historical reasons that what the IDE does is fragmented over different bits of code that don't listen to the same configuration. There is a lot of variation in preferences for indentation, where to put new lines, line length, what order to put imports in, which imports to use wildcards for (if any at all), etc. Particularly imports are a problem because the bit of code that organizes imports is separate from the bit of code that formats code in the IDE.

The common solution of using IDE plugins to work around this is a bit of a kludge. The proper solution would be a more sane way to just make the IDE externally configurable so that build tools can make the IDE do exactly the same as what they do without requiring users to manually configure their IDEs just right by installing plugins or fiddling with configuration. This stuff should not be user controllable if there is a build file that defines the proper formatting.

Coding agents actually add to this problem. Because getting those to stick to formatting conventions is tricky. Unless you have tools that just fix that properly.

So good change in uv and probably something I'd be using on my next python project (I do those once in a while).
by globnomulous | 2025-08-22 07:04:31+00:00
I belong to the camp for whom the capabilities of the models are irrelevant.

The largest and most successful models all appear to have been built unethically. I want nothing to do with these companies or the slime who run them, and I will leave my professional field before I'll become their unwilling user.

I don't want machines to write my code. I want to write it. I want to solve the problems and find the bugs myself. The engineers I work with who seem to rely most heavily on these tools all seem to be losing their sharpness and problem-solving ability. Many of them praise the models for making it easy to write tests..(Software engineers who treats testing with this kind of carelessness and dismissiveness should lose their jobs.)

I like what I do. I like the way I do it. The day I have no choice but do my work, in essence, by scheduling a fucking meeting with a chipper chat bot and telling it what to do will be the day I retire and start a new career. I can't imagine a drearier way to work with technology.
by overfeed | 2025-08-22 07:06:56+00:00
While it's the privacy advocate's ideal, the politics reality is very few governments will deploy "privacy preserving" cryptography that gets in the way of LE investigations[1]. The best you can hope for is some escrowed service that requires a warrant to unmask the identity for any given token, so privacy is preserved in most cases, and against most parties except law enforcement when there's a valid warrant.

1. They can do it overtly in thr design of the system, or covertly via side-channels, logging, or leaking bits in ways that are hard for an outsider to investigate without access to the complete source code and or/system outputs, such as not-quite-random pseudo-randoms.
by danielhanchen | 2025-08-22 07:07:14+00:00
Oh llamafile is very cool! I might add it as an option actually :) For generic exports (ie to vLLM, llamafile etc), normally finetunes end with model.save_pretrained_merged and that auto merges to 16bit safetensors which allows for further processing downstream - but I'll investigate llamafile more! (good timing since llamafile is cross platform!)
by throw_a_grenade | 2025-08-22 07:07:23+00:00
Has several definitions, usually 20 Hz — 20 kHz: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_frequency, but sometimes may refer to the range of specific codec (telephony might have something like 300—3400 Hz for example, so not this case). TFA means it as “I have a peripherial readily available”.
by uncircle | 2025-08-22 07:07:43+00:00
The question you need to ask yourself are:

- what exactly is “technology”?

- what is the difference between a screwdriver and Twitter? In other words, what are tools, and are they all equal?

- what is the end goal of a technological society focused on ever-increasing shareholder revenue?

Neil Postman has good books on this topic.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-22 07:07:44+00:00
Just to let you know though that its really rare that flatpak is used for cli's. I think I mentioned it in my comment too or if not, my apologies but flatpak is used mostly in gui's.

I doubt its efficacy here, they might be more useful if you provide a whole jupyter / browser gui though but a lot o f us run it just in cli so I doubt flatpak.

I didn't mean to say that flatpak was the right tool for this job, I seriously don't know too much to comment and so I'd prefer if you could ask someone definitely experienced regarding it.

My reasoning for flatpak was chunking support (that I think is rare in appimage) and easier gpu integration (I think) compared to docker, though my reasoning might be flawed since flatpak isn't mostly used with cli.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-22 07:08:13+00:00
I’ve found that it’s super likely to get stuck repeating the exact same incorrect response over and over. It used to happen occasionally with older models, but it happens frequently now.

Things like:

Me: Is this thing you claim documented? Where in the documentation does it say this?

GPT: Here’s a long-winded assertion that what I said before was correct, plus a link to an unofficial source that doesn’t back me up.

Me: That’s not official documentation and it doesn’t say what you claim. Find me the official word on the matter.

GPT: Exact same response, word-for-word.

Me: You are repeating yourself. Do not repeat what you said before. Here’s the official documentation: [link]. Find me the part where it says this. Do not consider any other source.

GPT: Exact same response, word-for-word.

Me: Here are some random words to test if you are listening to me: foo, bar, baz.

GPT: Exact same response, word-for-word.

It’s so repetitive I wonder if it’s an engineering fault, because it’s weird that the model would be so consistent in its responses regardless of the input. Once it gets stuck, it doesn’t matter what I enter, it just keeps saying the same thing over and over.
by kreelman | 2025-08-22 07:10:43+00:00
That's an interesting thought. I wonder.

I wonder if the following things make the C driven version slower...

- prepare the send buffers (sqlite side)

- prepare the receive buffers (go side)

- do the call

- get the received data into go buffers of some kind

- free up the send buffers (happens automatically)

- free up the receive buffers (semi automatically in Go).

When using stdin/stdout, the system looks after send/receive buffers. It's simply reading/writing them. No allocation is needed. The stream can be as big or as little as wanted/needed. The OS will look after the integrity of the streams and these are probably fairly well tested subsystems on most operating systems.

stdin/stdout becomes a "library" for "fast data transfer".

Pretty neat.
by nine_k | 2025-08-22 07:11:13+00:00
Ah, I see. I keep thinking that modern datacenters would looks more like [1], or at least like [2], with direct water cooling. Supermicro servers and even Dell PowerEdge servers now have the direct water cooling option.

OTOH the cooling of the resulting hot water can be evaporative indeed :(

[1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-effic...

[2]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/DLC-Rack
by CTDOCodebases | 2025-08-22 07:12:07+00:00
I had a Sony CPD-G400. I almost broke my back carrying it home from the store in the box.

That thing would do 1600x1200 at about 85Hz if I remember correctly.

A couple of years ago I got my hands on a Lacie Electron 22 Blue IV. I have to say as good as my Sony was I think the Lacie crushed it. I guess that would be expected since the Lacie was made for graphic designers.
by sureglymop | 2025-08-22 07:13:23+00:00
I always used to try doing that. Really putting in the work, thoroughly reading the docs, books, study enough to have all the background information and context. It works but takes a lot of time and focus.

However, for side projects, there may be many situations where the documentation is actually not that great. Especially when it comes to interacting with and contributing to open source projects. Most of the time my best bet would be to directly go read a lot of source code. It could take weeks before I could understand the system I'm interacting with well enough to create the optimal solution to whatever problem I'd be working on.

With AI now, I usually pack an entire code base into a text file, feed it into the AI and generate the first small prototypes by guiding it. And this really is just a proof of concept, a validation that my idea can be done reasonably well with what is given. After that I would read through the code line by line and learn what I need and then write my own proper version.

I will admit that with AI it still takes a long time, because often it takes 4 or 5 prototypes before it generates exactly what you had in mind without cheating, hard coding things or weird workarounds. If you think it doesn't, you probably have lower standards than me. And that is with continuous guidance and feedback. But it still shortens that "idea validation" phase from multiple weeks to just one for me.

So: is it immensely powerful and useful? Yes. Can it save you time? Sometimes. Is it a silver bullet that replaces a programmer completely? Definitely no.

I think an important takeaway here also is that I am talking strictly about side projects. It's great as the stakes are low. But I would caution to wait a little longer before putting it in production though.
by 0points | 2025-08-22 07:13:26+00:00
Many moons ago, the concept of chaos monkey [1] was concieved.

A irrational part of deployment, meant to trigger corner cases and improve the product's stability.

Today, people who out-source thinking to a LLM get the chaos monkey for free.

The only problem seems to be that the LLM proponents are ahistoricists.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey
by jdboyd | 2025-08-22 07:14:58+00:00
Increasingly zero smart features isn't one of the features of commercial displays. For instance, a lot of Samsungs want (but not require, as far as I know) you to use their VXT content and remote management system, including a mobile app to control calibration and they still run Tizen, like their consumer TVs. LG appears to be similar. NEC might be better about this by making the smarts an optional module. Hopefully all will be less onerous in their implementation of twiddling you with their smart features, but it is hard to get away from even in commercial displays now.
by Frieren | 2025-08-22 07:16:59+00:00
> Apple, Nvidia and US govt can provide the required funds

When the first tough about investing is to go to big corporations and the goverment instead of going to investors is a telling about how nowadays the economy works.

I love that the Orange guy has opened the door to the nationalization of big tech. I hope that the next president is bolder on this regard. If all these companies depend on monopolies to exists, they should be state owned/controlled.
by gambiting | 2025-08-22 07:17:54+00:00
Well, no, not really - Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit attrocity so great against the American people that they will have to look into who those people are and why they did it, at which point hopefully they will discover their own government's work in the middle east and rise up against the government in protest.

Obviously, that didn't happen - I don't think your average American had any interest in looking into any of it, they just went "Arab people bad, let's invade", and of course accepted even greater invigilation and intrusion into their daily life and travel than ever before, all in the name of "safety". So yeah, terrorists made our lives miserable - but they failed to achieve their goals.
by close04 | 2025-08-22 07:17:57+00:00
Add to the list almost all high end (dance) clubs, the kind that sell you the $50 bottle of champagne for $5000, "cleaning" thousands for every easily justifiable and anonymous bottle sale with close to 0 effort.

Actually, any business that can just add an arbitrarily huge markup for what are otherwise cheap, run of the mill products and services is probably also laundering money. Usually exclusive/luxury places, the ones where in one go they can convert the lowest possible cost into the highest possible clean profit.
by apples_oranges | 2025-08-22 07:18:04+00:00
People didn't always use statistics to discover truths about the world.

This, once developed, just happened to be a useful method. But given the abuse using those methods, and the proliferation of stupidity disguised as intelligence, it's always fitting to question it, and this time with this correlation noise observation.

Logic, fundamental knowledge about domains, you need that first. Just counting things without understanding them in at least one or two other ways, is a tempting invitation for misleading conclusions.
by LauraMedia | 2025-08-22 07:18:15+00:00
As a practical example, I've recently tried out v0's new updated systems to scaffold a very simple UI where I can upload screenshots from videogames I took and tag them.

The resulting code included an API call to run arbitrary SQL queries against the DB. Even after pointing this out, this API call was not removed or at least secured with authentication rules but instead /just/hidden/through/obscur/paths...