MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101a | 2025-08-12 14:11:44+00:00
> Interesting to compare the tech companies of last century with those of this era.

The 'tech companies' (equivalent) of the past tended to deal with physical goods, and so needed physical means of scaling to become as large as they did.

More recent tech companies are often software goods and services, where physical means of scaling may not be as important (though see perhaps with Moore and Dennard). Though those which deal with physical stuff do seem to have higher counts; see below.

> The number of people benefiting from an enterprise has shrunk considerably, with the benefits accruing more tightly within an already wealthy class.

Not sure if this is completely accurate. Kodak topped out at 145,000 employees in 1988:

* https://rbj.net/2017/09/13/kodaks-decades-of-decline/

Apple has 164,000; Microsoft has 228,000; Amazon has 1,610,000.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
by teunispeters | 2025-08-12 14:12:42+00:00
embedded hardware, any processor Rust doesn't support (there are many), and any place where code size is critical. Rust has a BIG base size for an application, uselessly so at this time. I'd also love to see if it offered anything that could be any use in those spaces - especially where no memory allocation takes place at all. C (and to a lesser extent C++) are both very good in those spaces.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-12 14:12:48+00:00
I think the short answer, is SEO is dying rapidly in the age of AI search engines. Search traffic is anecdotally being severely damaged when everyone can just get an AI answer; ad revenue is down especially after the pandemic; SEO spam is increasing from AI-generated websites.

We might reach the point of saying, screw it, it hardly matters anymore. The web has been conquered by LOB apps, Paywalls, and Walled Gardens; and there’s no real way to fix that, but there is a way to fix the tech we are using.

If anything, if we fully embrace “web as app engine,” we can fix some of these issues ahead of time. Maybe we have a standard entry point for crawlers (or users) requesting the raw text of a document. It’s better than being stuck in this awful in-between which we are right now.
by penguin202 | 2025-08-12 14:13:03+00:00
Which doesn't apply to the current administration, just fantasyland.

A small government regime, that wants to arm the public, is against censorship, wants to de-regulate industries, pro-capitalist, etc.. is not compatible with fascism.

How the hell is your fantasy a reality when you're literally wanting to arm the public and expand free speech?

The last guy wanted to get people fired from their jobs over an experimental jab (Nuremberg trials, anybody?), while his supporters were in favor of taking their kids and imprisoning parents into camps - expanding the government, increasing regulations, and literally forming a Ministry of Truth (DHS Disinformation Governance Board).

We've normalized bad behavior (ie: immigration law, Disinformation Governance Board, etc..) in this country for years and ignore laws governing that, so when we have to correct that behavior people tend to forget how we got here. I saw more systemic racism and discrimination under Obama & Biden than I have under Trump or Bush. I saw race and antisemitism heavily weaponized to divide and conquer under liberal administrations more than I ever have under centrist or right leaning administrations.

Its not fascism. Its just fools cherry picking things to live out some weird good guy/bad guy fantasy of theirs.

If this were a tech document, I'm sure the understanding would be far greater - but somehow that type of thinking and understanding goes out the window when it comes to this.
by cbhl | 2025-08-12 14:13:03+00:00
There _was_ an outlet for this during the era of Windows hegemony: the object and embed tags. You had your choice of ActiveX, Java, or Shockwave/Flash in the 90s to write applications that you could then embed in the web browser.

We stopped using these for a variety of reasons: they were difficult to make secure or cross-platform, GMail made building apps in JavaScript fashionable, and the iPhone (which explicitly would not support ActiveX/Java/Flash).
by JosephRedfern | 2025-08-12 14:14:00+00:00
There's a really interesting article from Tavis Ormandy about the instruction set and virtual machine used in RAR: https://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2012/09/fun-with-constrained-prog....

The docs for the toolchain he implemented (https://github.com/taviso/rarvmtools) allude to a number of bugs, but doesn't sound (??) like they're related to this vulnerability.
by Ologn | 2025-08-12 14:14:22+00:00
The ten most valuable S&P 500 companies are, in order of market cap:

Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Broadcom, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, and Walmart.

A commonality to most of them (and to a lesser extent all of them) is they write software.

If a company not on the list like Ford has an F-150 truck come off the assembly line, some of that $40,000 cost is in the capital expenditure for the plant, any automation it has, the software in the car and so on. But Ford has to pay for the aluminum, steel and glass for each truck. It has to pay for thousands of workers on the assembly line to attach and assemble parts for each truck.

Meanwhile, at Apple a team writes iOS 18, mostly based on iOS 17, and it ships with the devices. Once it is written that's it for what goes off on iPhone 16. There may be some additional tweaks up until iOS 18.6. The relatively small team working on iOS has it going out with tens of millions of units. Their work is not as connected to the process of production as the assembly line people attaching and assembling the F-150 truck. If some inessential feature is not done as a phone is being made, it will be punted to next release. This can't be done with an F-150 truck.

Software properly done is just much more profitable than non-software work. We can see this here. Yes, some of the latest boost is due to AI hype (which may or may not come to fruition in the near future), but these companies got to this position before all of that.

I was watching a speech by Gabe Newell talking about the (smaller) software industry of the 1990s, and the idea back then to outsource and try to save on salary costs. He said he and his partners went the other way and decided to look for the most expensive and best programmers they could find, and Valve has had great success with that. Over the past 2 1/2 years we've seen a lot of outsourcing to cheaper foreign labor, FAANG layoffs (including Microsoft's recent Xbox layoffs), and more recently attempts to lower costs by having software produced by less experienced vibe coders using "AI". I have seen myself at Fortune 100 companies, especially non-tech ones, that the lessons of the late 1960s NATO software engineering conferences, or the lessons learned by Fred Brooks while managing the OS/360 project in the 1960s haven't been learned. Software can be a very, very profitable enterprise, and it is sometimes done right, but companies are still often doing things in the same way they were attempting such projects in the early 1960s. Even attempts to fix things like agile and scrum get twisted around as window dressing to doing things in the old-fashioned corporate way.
by motorest | 2025-08-12 14:14:40+00:00
> Are we, in fact, if we're being honest?

Obviously, yes.

> I haven't seen anything like that. 99.9% of applications I interact with are just simple CRUD apps.

Irrelevant. Being CRUD is completely orthogonal to whether the WebApps are interactive or not.

Look at Gmail. You can hand wave over it and claim it's a CRUD app. However, no one in their right mind would try to deny the app is a "highly interactive, component-based, state-driven, design-system-heavy applications".

Also, it's silly to pretend that SPA-type apps are only justified if you check each box in the buzzword bingo card. One of the primary selling points of designing SPA or non-static lage, SPA-like WebApps is performance. Meaning, you are able to put together a highly performant web page if you do not require full page reloads each time anyone clicks on something, if you can easily implement optimistic logic in components, and if you can update only a subset of components when you receive a response from a request.

I recommend discovering the concept of perceived performance and afterwards you read through common patterns and strategies to optimize perceived performance. After you do that, go through a though experiment where you start off with an old timey dynamic HTML/server-side rendered WebApp and consider the challenge of achieving the same type of improvements in user experience, or even doing the same tricks. You'll quickly arrive at the same conclusions at the whole world around you already arrived at.
by blitzar | 2025-08-12 14:15:05+00:00
And yet their quaterly and annual reports dont mention it at all till 2022 and the team are now being "helped out" by new $100mil talent.

There is an amazing team there that did the work, I am just saying it wasnt the visionaries vision that made that happen - and if it was they certainly wouldnt have let the Ai team publish or opensource their work.
by pc86 | 2025-08-12 14:15:44+00:00
So what?

That sounds dismissive, and maybe it is, but I'm being serious here. What is the point of coming here and saying "when I was 12, my parents had less money than yours did when you were 12?" Privilege is relative, "common" is relative, and constantly being dragged into oppression Olympics of who has or had things slightly worse is exhausting and not conducive to conversation.

Better keep in mind that someone here almost certainly had it even worse than you when they were in elementary school, lest you go a few seconds without acknowledging your privileged upbringing, for some reason, in a conversation where it bears absolutely no relation to anything.
by moksha256 | 2025-08-12 14:16:14+00:00
To me the biggest not-easily-replaceable value is the "Hub" part of GitHub. It's easy enough to stand up your own Gitea or Forgejo instance for mirroring personal Git repos, set up your own GitLab instance for more sophisticated collaboration and CI workflows, etc...but the discoverability GitHub provides in its current form, since the vast majority of repos are hosted there (or at least have some kind of mirror there) is unparalleled.
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 14:16:36+00:00
I've read the same "30 year low" press release. 30 years ago, in the 90s, DC's homicide rate was hovering around the 70-80 per 100k range, which are truly frightening numbers not be seen outside of literal wartime[0]. It's good news that violent crime is down since then, but it speaks to a blind spot[1] that you do not find the current violent crime rate to be utterly unacceptable.

> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.

I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.

> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.

As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?

[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.
by api | 2025-08-12 14:16:38+00:00
One of the major things that has always bothered me about crypto: if an economically "irrational" large player wanted to 51% something like Bitcoin, they could.

I am thinking of, for example, a nation-state. Let's say the US, EU, or China decided for some reason that it was in their national interest to blow up Bitcoin. This could happen if an adversary like Russia or its allies were using Bitcoin for funding and there was a war or a major Cold War style struggle. Such players could afford to purchase and build, in secret, a huge mining farm, and then suddenly turn it on, not caring about the cost because the goals are strategic. It would be massively expensive but it doesn't matter for this case.
by cess11 | 2025-08-12 14:16:44+00:00
Yes, I have, and they were not as meticulously frugal as the 100r couple have been. When they've described having contact with family it's been things like this:

"We got a message from Iridium saying our account was about to be suspended. We think we may have used up all our data. We can't check the weather, but SMS still work and we're trying to get in contact with them to append more minutes. Devine's dad is also helping us with it. What a shit show. We should have purchased more, but also, I don't know how it is possible that we went through it all. We did have some issues with the device, with it stalling during some internet calls... maybe this ate up extra minutes. Either way, this situation is shit, as we don't know what's going on out there and we can't broadcast our position."

"We received a message from Devine's dad, saying that he'd contacted the customer service at Iridium and that we had indeed, run out of data. Our plan was topped up, and we're able to update our position on the live map, check emails and to check the weather — finally!"

It's been much more common that they've made friends at sea and earned knowledge and help that way, besides the business they do.
by Jarmsy | 2025-08-12 14:16:47+00:00
That was one part of the article I found questionable- "If the body needs salt, those chips will cause a surge of pleasurable dopamine to flood the brain. If the body doesn’t need salt, that dopamine drip disappears"

Surely this second part is false? Most of us have got used to high levels of salt in modern diets, and prefer the taste of salty things even when we've had way more sodium than we need.
Show HN: Put a Contract on Your Goals
by Looksmaxxer | 2025-08-12 14:16:47+00:00
Struggling to stick to goals? I built [Contracted.pw](http://www.contracted.pw)—a commitment contract app to force accountability. Set a goal (quit smoking, exercise, etc.), deposit money, and lose 5% every time you fail. Check in daily to keep your cash. No subscriptions, refund anytime. It’s brutal, but it works. Try it and lock in.
by whymauri | 2025-08-12 14:16:53+00:00
This is what the rows look like:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/princeton-nlp/SWE-bench_Veri...

Its up to your retrieval system/model to selectively hunt for relevant context. Here's a few critiques of the benchy:

https://x.com/brhydon/status/1953648884309536958
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-12 14:17:03+00:00
> Ethan Guo was hoping to become the youngest person to fly solo to all seven continents

I think a more favorable title is "US pilot stranded in Antarctica after landing plane without permission". They chose the word "influencer" for a reason, even though it was a pilot trying to set a record that happened to film himself. He's even flying to raise funds for cancer research.

Too bad he lied to ground control, what a great way to lose your license, prison aside.

edit: to answer some of the replies, I'm just concerned with the implicit patronization that media applies to anyone who has a hobby/career but also makes money off of publicizing it.
by eadmund | 2025-08-12 14:17:10+00:00
> 99.9% of applications I interact with are just a series of simple CRUD operations.

The vast majority of web apps out there could be implemented as REST systems (in the real, Fielding, HATEOAS sense, not the JSON-over-HTTP sense).

There are a few out there which need to be web apps, but those are relatively rare.
by quotemstr | 2025-08-12 14:17:10+00:00
We had a web for applications. It was called telnet. AOL, Prodigy, and others all had actually-pretty-sophisticated remote application deployment systems with vector graphics and fancy input processing. In the early days of the web, it was also common to write line-of-business apps using tools like Visual Basic, Hypercard, and even Excel (some things never change). The web won over all of them because, as history tells us, there are fitness advantages (e.g. platform agnosticism, easy introspection, and gradual enrichment) to evolving application capabilities into a widget toolkit that you just don't get if you try to make the optimal widget toolkit up front.

If Tim Berners-Lee had made the web for apps and not documents, history would have been no different. Somebody besides Tim would have made a remote document system and we'd all be using that instead of something called the web.
Show HN: Griddle – a daily logical deduction puzzle
by agambon | 2025-08-12 14:17:18+00:00
Hey all, I made a daily logic puzzle as a passion project, and I'd love for you to test it.

If you are interested, read on for a bit of a devlog and backstory.

I have always been obsessed with logical deduction puzzles. These are my actual logic puzzle books from when I was 10 years old: https://i.imgur.com/h1HULLk.png I would spend hours doing these puzzles, and it's been on my backlog for a long time to make something that captures that feeling again.

This particular kind of grid-based logic puzzle is sometimes referred to as "Einstein's Riddle" or "a zebra puzzle". There are other online implementations of these puzzles but I personally either disliked the UX or disliked the format of the clues. For Griddle I opted for a more abstracted format, using emoji-style SVGs. So, if the categories are 'job' and 'pet', a simple clue like [Astronaut is Dog] would mean that The job 'Astronaut' has a one-to-one relationship with 'Dog' from the pet category.

Getting it to play nicely on mobile was a tricky beast, because the standard format of this kind of puzzle is a choppy grid that is as wide as it is tall, wherein every category is shown to have a relation to every other category. To solve this, I added two UX options: 'full view' and 'simple view'. In simple view, your categorical relations are presented as discrete square grids in a single column. This is very nice on mobile, but lacks the visual link that cues you into make transitive conclusions. If you opt for full view, you have to scroll left and right, but you get the full visual context of how things relate to each other transitively. The column and row headers are 'sticky' and will follow you so you don't forget the context of the cell you're looking at.

My favorite part of developing this was figuring out the logic for generating interesting, solvable puzzles with a minimum number of clues. Generating the puzzle solution matrix is easy (and all randomization is done via deterministic/seeded shuffle with the puzzle date as the seed, so re-generations are consistent). Select a number of categories, select a number of items in each, and map them uniquely one-one-one.

I defined a a number of clue types that have their own logic.

equality: A is B

inequality: A is not B

2-category XOR: A is either B or C (B and C are from same category)

and so on and so on.

Then the solver algorithm does all the work.

- generate a candidate clue of each allowed type

- filter out invalid clues

- weight the 'impact' of each clue based on how many cells it would fill

- select one with weighted (and seeded) randomization - but don't exclude clues with weight 0, because sometimes a clue is only useful later!

- iterate through all transitive and deductive logic and all past clues until no more cells are filled

- if not solved, do it again until solved

- randomize clue order

- run the solver AGAIN, this time trimming out any that don't contribute to puzzle progress

There is probably a more efficient and smarter way to do this, but it works.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-12 14:17:27+00:00
I wanted a response that was an actual answer to the question. Instead, you made a post which was not a response to the question. You commented on the background and assumed something to which was not true. Then you got offended that I called you out on it. And now here we are with "not reddit" responses.

You provided no details on build quality of the Surface. You provided no information on if the touchscreen makes it a better product. You provided nothing useful towards answering the question I asked.
by sublimefire | 2025-08-12 14:17:29+00:00
A lot of folks understood that LLMs are just a system that can operate on fuzzy input and convert it or derive some possible actions, and you need data to ground the results. This has led to the “actions” and “mcp” and other stuff. But security as always was left at the bus stop and the bus has left. Completely ridiculous absence of any security in these systems shows how much stupid money is in this business. Ignorance is a bliss. Until someone finds a way to distribute worms in training data which will break the world, not much will change.
by rwmj | 2025-08-12 14:17:32+00:00
The VF2 (original) is a stolid workhorse, as long as you only use it for simple CLI-based stuff. The hardware is very well supported by Linux. The performance isn't great, but I used it to fix hundreds of Fedora packages to add RISC-V support, so you can't really beat its effectiveness. You do want to get the version with the max amount of RAM, and you'll also need to add an M.2 for storage (one PCIe lane!)
by vehemenz | 2025-08-12 14:17:57+00:00
I don't see how that's possible. My experience has been the exact opposite.

When you say "handwritten CSS selectors and classes," what you really mean is learning a unique codebase with high levels of abstraction that map on to the DOM in a structured way that cannot be automatically inferred. It has to be learned by looking at both the CSS (often buried in many component files) and how the components are implemented in the DOM. In large projects, this is far from trivial.

And I think that's the key. When people say "handwritten" CSS is either, what they mean is that their small project, with no other contributors, is easier to manage.

When picking up a Tailwind project, what's to learn again? You might forget some of the class names, but if you already know the CSS properties, you're 80% there. With your IDE's completion, you're 90%. And crucially, no context switching whatsoever.