MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anovikov | 2025-08-22 05:56:51+00:00
That's obvious nonsense. Just to remind, during WWII Soviet Union suffered 7.9M killed and missing in action (same metric). Out of prewar population of 190M. Ukraine had a prewar population of under 40M even including the already occupied territories and at most 35M without. 1.7M killed and missing will mean higher loss rate than Soviet Union during WWII and it was thoroughly depopulated.

Ukraine is barely scratching the surface of its manpower reserves - i mean, i have lots of lots of acquaintances or friends there. Some got drafted and are fighting, a few volunteered, most have some way to avoid service which they of course exploit to the fullest, one is in hiding to ditch an already issued draft notice, but no one got killed or maimed yet. One guy suffers from PTSD but he got it 10 years ago fighting for Donetsk, not during the full-scale invasion.

Most importantly, under-25 are not even conscripted yet. And they make the bulk of truly capable fighters.
by prmoustache | 2025-08-22 05:57:00+00:00
Email is no big deal, I used to have email with my own domain accounts, now that I changed registrar I decided 2 years ago to separate duty and I am using migadu of which I am satisfied.

I am installing mobile apps with accrescent, f-droid and aurora on grapheneos. There is a handful of apps I have never been able to install, because they are regionally limited and you have no control on regional accounts that aurora accounts use. I just live without them, no big deal. The service is usually provided by a web page anyway.

I am using an external cloud storage with wasabi as secondary backup site, I don't need any other cloud storage.
by bmcahren | 2025-08-22 05:57:13+00:00
I think the other important step is to reject code your engineers submit that they can't explain for a large enterprise saas with millions of lines of code. I myself reject I'd say 30% of the code the LLMs generate but the power is in being able to stay focused on larger problems while rapidly implementing smaller accessory functions that enable that continued work without stopping to add another engineer to the task.

I've definitely 2-4X'd depending on the task. For small tasks I've definitely 20X'd myself for some features or bugfixes.
by latexr | 2025-08-22 05:57:35+00:00
> But what's the difference between one user making 900k hits and 900k different users making one hit?

What’s the difference between giving 900K meals to one person and feeding 900K people? The former is being abusive, wasteful, and depriving almost 900K other people of food. They are also being deceitful by pretending to be 900K different people.

Resources are finite. Web requests aren’t food, but you still pay for them. A spike in traffic may mean your service being down for the rest of the month, which is more acceptable if you helped a bunch of people who have now learned about and can talk about and share what you provided, versus having wasted all your traffic on a single bad actor who didn’t even care because they were just a robot.

> makes me suspect there's substantial incompetence in the solutions deployed to serve them

So you see bots scraping the Wikipedia webpages instead of downloading their organised dump, or scraping every git service webpage instead of cloning a repo, and think the incompetence is with the website instead of the scraper wasting time and resources to do a worse job?
Show HN: Ooxy – a general-purpose protocol bridge
by Rits1272 | 2025-08-22 05:57:40+00:00
I’ve been hacking on Ooxy, an open-source protocol bridge. Unlike tools tied to a single layer, Ooxy is meant to bridge across layers and protocols.

Ooxy is inspired by cloudflare's oxy proxy framework: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/

Right now, making ooxy work as Layer 3 → Layer 7 bridge, letting proxy-unaware devices speak through HTTP/S proxies. The idea is to grow it into a reusable way to connect otherwise incompatible protocols.

Repo: github.com/Rits1272/ooxy

I’d love feedback on which protocol bridges would be most useful, and where this could go next.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-22 05:58:00+00:00
I don't think so. I think the other code should just stop using isinstance checks and switch to some custom function. I personally think isinstance checks benefit from having its behavior simpler and less dynamic.

> check if a class implements an interface, without explicitly inheriting ABC or Protocol

This really doesn't sound like a feature that belongs in the language. Go do something custom if you really want it.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-22 05:58:05+00:00
True investment is when you put capital into a project or endeavor that is expected to earn rewards beyond its future sale price. You open a restaurant, and sell meals for more than the cost to make them. If your only hope is that 3 years from now you can sell the restaurant for more than you bought it for, it's no investment. Even if gold will be worth more, it won't make more of itself.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-22 05:58:08+00:00
My team has been chewed out for "just because it didn't work once, you need to keep trying it." That feels, to be blunt, almost religious. Claude didn't bless you because you didn't pray often enough and weren't devout enough.

Maybe we need to not just say "people aren't adopting it" but actually listen to why.

AI is a new tool with a learning curve. But that means it's a luxury choice-- we can spend our days learning the new tool, trying out toy problems, building a workflow, or we can continue to use existing tools to deliver the work we already promised.

It's also a tool with an absolutely abysmal learning model right now. Think of the first time you picked up some heavy-duty commercial software (Visual Studio, Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, whatever). Yes, it's complex. But for those programs, there were reliable resources and clear pathways to learn it. So much of the current AI trend seems to be "just keep rewording the prompt and asking it to think really hard and add more descriptive context, and eventually magic happens." This doesn't provide a clear path to mastery, or even solid feedback so people can correct and improve their process. This isn't programming. It's pleading with a capricious deity. Frustration is understandable.

If I have to use AI, I find I prefer the Cursor experience of "smarter autocomplete" than the Claude experience of prompting and negotiation. It doesn't have the "special teams" problem of having to switch to an entirely different skill set and workflow in the middle of the task, and it avoids dumping 2000 line diffs so you aren't railroaded into accepting something that doesn't really match your vision/style/standards.

What would I want to see in a prompt-based AI product? You'd have much more documented, formal and deterministic behaviour. Less friendly chat and more explicit debugging of what was generated and why. In the end, I guess we'd be reinventing one of those 1990s "Rapid Application Development" environments that largely glues together pre-made components and templates, except now it burns an entire rainforest to build one React SPA. Has anyone thought about putting a chat-box front end around Visual Basic?
How to find OSS libraries/projects that are looking for maintainers?
by comatory | 2025-08-22 05:58:13+00:00
As the title suggests, I’d like to know what are the methods for finding out this information, apart from explicitly searching such projects via GH, mailing lists etc. E.g. would like to have a list, which I could filter by tech stack or area (UI, cryptography…)
by AIorNot | 2025-08-22 05:59:15+00:00
Did you read my comment? I’m not promoting Langan and Weinstein either -

I’m promoting Jaimungals podcast (which was disparaged on this thread) which is an absolutely wonderful for cross-disciplinary exploration of TOEs and cutting edge concepts in physics, AI, biology and consciousness and philosophy

For example this podcast Frederic Schuller, an award-winning theoretical physicist and professor

https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg?si=2PwkFzH4OJ2r8eMT

And this with Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes https://youtu.be/gEK4-XtMwro?si=bYAHDO4iWh9WRV8J
by jothetaha | 2025-08-22 05:59:42+00:00
You’re absolutely right about the font — it’s way too small. I already had in mind to enlarge it in the next update. As for accessibility, on Android/Web I’m aware it’s not great: the app currently relies on a specific renderer that only works properly with newer browsers, while on older ones it doesn’t behave as expected. Thanks a lot for pointing it out!
by ath3nd | 2025-08-22 06:00:25+00:00
> Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo

The problem is that their products are getting worse and worse. Signal is already taking a huge share from WhatsApp (ads and AI chat bots, really?) and Messenger.

TikTok absolutely obliterated Instagram. Facebook is sliding into irrelevancy, and most importantly, they have a lot of failed products like Oculus, Metaverse (wtf is it anyway), LLAMa, etc. Now they are sliding into even more irrelevance and burning money even faster trying to poach extremely expensive OpenAI folks. My conspiracy theory is that Facebook ads earning numbers are somehow a scam.

After so many bad decisions on their part, so much waste and bad execution that I can't see them surviving the next 5 years.
by tomoiaga | 2025-08-22 06:04:27+00:00
eMag is full of fake SSDs. Don’t ever buy from sellers, only if sold by eMag directly or from a reputable seller that you know. And it’s not only SSDs. This has been going on for many years and yes, when you give in to promotions like 70-80% the price of an original you usually get a fake.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-22 06:04:44+00:00
Actually we have(or had?) another, more common wording for that sort of bureaucraZy:

Schreibtischpingpong where you are the ball being table tennised from desk to desk :)

I never heard 'Büroflipper', which comes to mind when thinking about this. Being the ball in a pin ball machine.

Probably because it's too fast, compared to the latencies in real life. But that would apply to Schreibtischpingpong, too.
by mcdeltat | 2025-08-22 06:05:43+00:00
Destructuring yes but you can still argue it's poorly designed. Particularly unintuitive because matching on a nested name e.g. module.CONSTANT works for matching and doesn't destructure. It's just the use of an unnested name which does destructuring.

What Python needs is what Elixir has. A "pin" operator that forces the variable to be used as its value for matching, rather than destructuring.
by jcranmer | 2025-08-22 06:06:53+00:00
There is, I think, an ownership model that Rust's borrow checker very poorly supports, and for lack of a better name, I've called it hot potato ownership. The basic idea is that you have a buffer which you can give out as ownership in the expectation that the person you gave it to will (eventually) give it back to you. It's a sort of non-lexical borrowing problem, and I very quickly discovered when trying to implement it myself in purely safe Rust that the "giving the buffer back" is just really gnarly to write.
by prerok | 2025-08-22 06:07:11+00:00
That's an interesting take but I think it's unlikely for two reasons:

1. In any case you view it, it's not trivial, which was the statement in the note. If it were, the effort to publish just for n=4 would be silly, because it would take equal effort to just publish for general case. That he withheld the proof just to mess with people is highly unlikely.

2. I definitely do not make private notes in my books just so that maybe somebody later on would pick up that book and wonder whether I had indeed discovered the secrets of the universe. I definitely do not write "challenges to the community" there.
by goyagoji | 2025-08-22 06:07:12+00:00
Or maybe you misunderstood.. It is a warning to people like those on this site (demographics wise) not to create the necessary powder keg by raising inequality. Whether an angry civil war works out in the end doesn't mean much to those killed at the beginning.

For modern society the question of whether there are any regrets in living in a world entirely restructured by the French Revolution is maybe also interesting, but I think people should be a little selfish about having a reasonable present.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-22 06:07:12+00:00
They can just buy other companies for 5 years and coast, or they would have done if not for antitrust concerns under Biden. They can afford to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to rockstars for well over 5 years, and acquihire their way to acquiring the next big thing. I think they’re probably appropriately valued alongside other trillion dollar companies, but they will likely find that it’s less lonely at the top than anticipated.

Signal serves IC interests too by requiring phone numbers.
by buildbot | 2025-08-22 06:07:33+00:00
Honestly it's a large enough library with enough weirdness and untested areas, footguns, and bugs that I'd deem it just as valid as React for example.

Why did tensor_parallel have output += mod instead of output = output + mod? (The += breaks backprop). Nobody tested it! A user had to notice it was broken and make a PR!
by Simon_O_Rourke | 2025-08-22 06:09:49+00:00
Not very is the answer. When I worked in finance in the UK a few years back, the credit control team had a few ex-commercial bankers. Those guys had wild stories, the best ones were usually how much money they'd find being added to children's accounts for "birthday gift money". Usually with certain groups who have traditionally large families, the children would all have regular four and five figure cash lodgements.
Ask HN: Recently laid off developer looking for solo product ideas
by thatgloomyguy | 2025-08-22 06:12:22+00:00
I'm an experienced (10+) fullstack developer who was recently laid off and find myself at an interesting crossroads. Rather than immediately jumping back into the job search, I'm considering this an opportunity to explore building something on my own or working on exciting ideas that could turn into meaningful products. I am looking for I ideas for solo products that could be built and launched relatively quickly and problems worth solving that don't require a large team initially. Also looking for opportunities to collaborate on interesting projects with other developers. Have you built successful solo products? What problems are you seeing in your day-to-day work that could use better solutions? Any advice for someone making this transition?
by Freak_NL | 2025-08-22 06:12:23+00:00
What makes this such a localised phenomenon? Locking shopping cart wheels just aren't a thing here in the Netherlands (or neighbouring countries). It used to be that most required a €1 coin inserted to unlock its link tethering it to the next car in the row, but then covid happened and a lot of shops simply disabled those locks and concluded that the system worked better without — probably driven in part by an increasing number of people who don't carry any cash.

Losing a cart is expensive, but it doesn't seem to happen at the scale that would make a full blown locking wheel solution cost effective.
by senko | 2025-08-22 06:12:28+00:00
The article missed the chance to include the quote from that standard compendium of information and wisdom, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

> Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-22 06:13:01+00:00
> Wait… that's the specific question I had, because rendered text would require OCR to be read by a machine. Why would an AI do that costly process in the first place? Is it part of the multi-modal system without it being able to differenciate that text from the prompt?

Its part of the multimodal system that the image itself is part of the prompt (other than tuning parameters that control how it does inference, there is no other input channel to a model except the prompt.) There is no separate OCR feature.

(Also, that the prompt is just the initial and fixed part of the context, not something meaningfully separate from the output. All the structure—prompt vs. output, deeper structure within either prompt or output for tool calls, media, etc.—in the context is a description of how the toolchain populated or treats it, but fundamentally isn't part of how the model itself operates.)
by woile | 2025-08-22 06:13:59+00:00
Don't apologize, you are doing amazing work. I appreciate the effort you put.

Usually you don't make assumptions on the host OS, just try to find the things you need and if not, fail, ideally with good feedback. If you want to provide the "hack", you can still do it, but ideally behind a flag, `allow_installation` or something like that. This is, if you want your code to reach broader audiences.
by nullc | 2025-08-22 06:14:40+00:00
I don't think it has anything to do with being a reactionary movement or counter culture. If it were I would expect, among other things, that it would absolutely prohibit the use of AI entirely rather than just require disclosure.

The background is that many higher profile open source projects are getting deluged by low quality AI slop "contributions", not just crappy code but when you ask questions about it you sometimes get an argumentative chatbot lying to you about what the PR does.

And this latest turn has happened on top of other trends in 'social' open source development that already had many developers considering adopting far less inclusive practice. RETURN TO CATHEDRAL, if you will.

The problem isn't limited to open source, it's also inundating discussion forums.
by instig007 | 2025-08-22 06:17:47+00:00
Being in line with the bad original design decision is another bad design decision, python developers should have a courage to admit these instances to benefit from better decisions in new peps. They didn't do it with pattern matching and now the language has another inferior implementation of a feature that, if implemented correctly, should have had clear block scopes, defined as expressions (as opposed to statements), and disallowed type-diverging branches. Java has designed it right, by the way, despite having a differently behaving switch statement in the language already.
by xuki | 2025-08-22 06:18:06+00:00
Facebook certainly did not have the resources and experiences to make a mobile OS at that point. Microsoft tried and failed, there was no space for a 3rd mobile OS.

> They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.

This was one of the first friction Facebook encountered with Apple. They wanted to make their own store in the Facebook app on iOS, but obviously Apple said no. Maybe doing Facebook app in HTML5 was a way to protest against the way Apple was moving things forward, but again it didn't work, their app was crap and they rewrote everything in native.
by jadamson | 2025-08-22 06:21:37+00:00
> Since 7.8 kHz is in the audio range, you can use the parasitic EMF from your phone's speaker to "transmit" a similar code by playing a crafted audio file

The range of human hearing is about 20 to 20000 Hz. As a by-product of producing physical vibrations at those frequencies (i.e. producing sound) via an electromagnetic coil, a speaker will produce an EMF with the same frequencies.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-22 06:22:12+00:00
I'm from the Netherlands. The last few years there have been issues with ground water levels dropping and a lack of rainfall. To the point where water companies are asking consumers to reduce their water use for e.g. irrigating their gardens, shower less long, etc.

Of course, the notion of a water shortage in a country where two of the largest rivers in Europe empty in the North Sea and that keeps about a third of it's land that lies below sea levels dry by actively pumping relatively clean water out is a bit of a weird notion to sell. We have a surplus of water, not a shortage. Rivers overflowing their dikes is an issue we deal with regularly. And a lot of infrastructure to dump that into the North Sea by the millions of liters per day.

The issue isn't that there isn't more clean water than we can handle but that more water gets taken from limited ground water reserves than is added back naturally. This would be a non-issue if we'd mostly use surface water instead.

Most of this ground water isn't even used by consumers but by agriculture. And worse, farmers also work very hard to keep their land dry after irrigating it because they need the ground to be moist, not soaking wet as in a swamp. The water that they drain is very high in nutrients because they are using a lot of fertilizer too. So, basically, agriculture is in the business of taking rain water that dumps on their land and surrounding lands and basically dumping it into rivers without even using it for irrigation. But then when it doesn't rain, they use ground water to irrigate, which then drains into rivers. As a result, nature is suffering because ground water levels are dropping and because surface water is polluted. Ground water is also used for consumers.

The solution is of course to use slightly more expensive to use water from e.g. surface water or rain water (which is generally drained to get rid of it ASAP). Of course a lot of that water isn't as easy to access everywhere so it requires infrastructure (pipes) or storage (reservoirs). But historically, ground water was there and relatively clean (so it can be used without much processing) and people just use it without thinking about it. Most people with gardens don't even capture the water that falls on their roofs, which on an annual basis should be plenty to water their gardens. Neither are they (re)using grey water or rain water for e.g. flushing their toilets. All of that is done using tap water that comes from ground water.

This isn't a shortage crisis but a water abuse crisis. The solution is being a bit smarter about what water we use for which purpose. And a lot of that is rethinking intensive agriculture. We grow crops to feed cattle that produces so much manure that we have severe nitrogen pollution getting in the way of economic growth because we have to limit construction in/near polluted areas. Those crops uses ground water and feed the cattle. The problems are connected.
by yonatan8070 | 2025-08-22 06:24:08+00:00
I believe this is referring to the human ear's frequency range, so 20Hz-20kHz, which is a range that phone speakers can produce pressure waves at. I didn't watch the talk either, but I'm assuming that one of the following cases is true:

1. The phone's speaker generates a small amount of EM intereference at the audio frequency it's playing at 2. The sound waves hitting the locking electronics cause them to vibrate at that frequency and pick up random noise from the environment as a signal.

Either way, by using a frequency between 20Hz and 20kHz, everyone has some kind of "transmitter" that can generate mostly arbitrary waveforms.
by mjg59 | 2025-08-22 06:24:51+00:00
Laserdisc will output 480i rather than 240p (it's just an encoding of the NTSC signal) and lag isn't really an issue, and the linked page doesn't really cover the other advantages. I can imagine that a TV's scaler isn't optimised for composite signals (or even ingesting and filtering the composite signals in the first place), but also laserdisc is just going to look kind of bad compared to modern formats even under the best of circumstances. Even back in the 90s, when encoders were at their worst, DVD was considered a meaningful step up from laserdisc.
by jabl | 2025-08-22 06:25:19+00:00
What I've done is use the "podman kube play" similar to docker-compose when developing ("podman kube play file.yaml", "podman kube play --down file.yaml", "podman kube play --replace file.yaml", etc.) with the "file.yaml" in my working directory. Then when I'm satisfied and want to deploy to production I write a quadlet snippet referencing the kube file and put them under /etc.