MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saubeidl | 2025-08-09 19:25:05+00:00
That's not true and the City of Vienna proved that thesis wrong a century ago. [0].

Even today, two-thirds of Viennese residents live in public housing, the city is Europe's largest landlord and as a result, housing is extremely affordable for a world-class city. It's not without reason that Vienna tends to top worldwide quality of life rankings - it's the achievements of Red Vienna.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...
by hinkley | 2025-08-09 19:25:06+00:00
One of the things I love about “Contact” is that the contact mechanism chosen by the aliens was so close to what I guessed aliens would use when I first learned about SETI.

Decimal is not universal. Not seconds, not meters, not sound frequencies used for communication, not colors. Our sky isn’t blue, it’s purple. Ask any bee and they’ll tell you. But hydrogen glows at very specific colors and that only changes if you are moving fast enough.

The fundamental colors are the colors of the elements and, I might argue, their oxides. As reflected by light or when they incandesce. Gold. Rust. Arsenic green. Carbon black. Maybe the emission bands of noble gases, though those are hardly every day items.

(If I were a very clever alien though, and I discovered exotic states of matter where the elements behaved differently, and I only wanted to talk to other very clever aliens, I might use those instead to talk over the heads of the younger or dumber species, which is why I stopped contributing to SETI. We are looking under the wrong rocks, IMO).
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-08-09 19:25:23+00:00
Most, if not all, Canadian admissions are holistic. All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad. As a result, for undergrad at least, no one really cares what school you went to.

From outside looking in, the American system has a hilariously unequal system. Certain opportunities are hoarded by an insanely small set of schools, almost entirely based on "prestige" and financial dominance. And it's this crazy arms-race/pressure cooker to get in. But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard. No one freaks out about admissions to "mid-tier" schools. It's entirely about a select coterie of schools who people rightly perceive as gatekeeping to an incredible extent.

None of the schools actually emphasize being accessible and hard to graduate from. The incentives are all weird and cater to a small elite population. The name on the degree is more important than earning the degree.
by mpetroff | 2025-08-09 19:25:27+00:00
I wrote a simple web-based night sky viewer a while ago [1], which renders the 750 brightest stars from coordinates in a data file (along with the moon). It uses D3.js to do fully client-side SVG-based rendering for interactive use, but it could be simplified to render server side to an SVG file. I think the main complication is that by adding stars, a projection needs to be decided on, and you'd need to consider the aspect ratio of the browser window.

[1] https://github.com/mpetroff/nightsky
by accrual | 2025-08-09 19:25:31+00:00
> i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.

Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!

OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.
by simonw | 2025-08-09 19:25:31+00:00
Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. [...]

LLMs will always suck at writing code that has not be written millions of times before. As soon as you venture slightly offroad, they falter.

That right there is your learning curve! Getting LLMs to write code that's not heavily represented in their training data takes experience and skill and isn't obvious to learn.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-09 19:25:40+00:00
2023 was a crazy and exciting year for AI research. LLMs have come a long way, but clearly still have a long way to go. They should do much better on most of these questions.

The discussion at the end also reminded me of how a lot of us took Gary Marcus' prose more seriously at the time before many of his short-term predictions started failing spectacularly.
Show HN: Tovideo – AI Video Generator with 9 Models (Google Veo 3 etc.)
by incendies | 2025-08-09 19:25:55+00:00
Hey everyone,

I built TOVIDEO, an AI-powered video generator that turns text prompts or still images into cinematic videos in seconds.

No editing skills required — just type, upload, and generate.

Why I built it?

I wanted to make high-quality AI video creation accessible to everyone without the usual complexity of video editing software. Current AI video tools are often locked to one model, expensive, or lack flexibility.

What’s unique about this application?

9+ AI Models in one place: Google Veo 3, LTX Video, Pixverse v4.5, Seedance Lite, Kling v2.1, Luma Dream Machine, Wan 2.2, etc.

Both text-to-video and image-to-video in full 1080p HD

Multiple aspect ratios (16:9, 9:16, 1:1)

Adjustable duration (5–10 seconds)

Credit-based system for flexible usage instead of only subscriptions

Tech stack

Frontend: React Native (iOS)

Backend: Firebase + custom API integrations for AI models

Monetization: RevenueCat for subscription & credit purchases

I’d love your feedback, especially on:

Model performance differences you notice

Features you’d like in future updates

Any UX improvements you think would help
by LarMachinarum | 2025-08-09 19:26:25+00:00
Qt used to be what I used as well, but the licensing has become so repulsive for professional use that I now refuse to touch it now (not even for my open source side projects where this wouldn't be an issue).

Too bad the hopes from the early Nokia adoption days got smashed by MS mole Elop and the later owners of Qt.
by xipho | 2025-08-09 19:27:20+00:00
Child comment is probably right, "asymmetrical" was likely going through my mind, or some chimera of both. I mean to say that whatever humans do, their actions ("requests"), don't get a response from "nature" immediately, the "response" is unpredictable, particularly as to when it will come back. If we get a break down SS, we get no response. Request(s) -> nature impacted -> some time passes -> response comes back, but not all nice and linear, nor always what we expected. "Promises" only coming with deep understanding.
by kurthr | 2025-08-09 19:27:24+00:00
Yes, one challenge with defining Subtractive primaries is that they are dependent on the white point of the "white" light source (e.g. D65 vs D50). While this seems inconvenient, it's worth noting that the apparent color of greys for Additive primaries is also dependent on surrounding illumination.

So primaries are useful for generating roughly orthogonal changes in perceived color, but they don't tell you how they will be perceived in absolute terms without knowing surrounding illumination. In the simplest case, asking if something is bright (even without color) is impossible without knowing the surroundings.
by lsaferite | 2025-08-09 19:27:34+00:00
Eh... No, it does not support streaming responses.

I know this because I wish it did. You can approximate streaming responses by using progress notifications. If you want something like the LLM partial response streaming, you'll have to extend MCP with custom capabilities flags. It's totally possible to extend it in this way, but then it's non standard.

Perhaps you are alluding to the fact that it's bidirectional protocol (by spec at least).
by MyNameIsFred | 2025-08-09 19:27:57+00:00
I'm a personal and professional advocate from r passkeys, yet I must acknowledge that your criticisms and skepticism are valid. I don't see this as a flaw in the passkeys concept so much as a growing pain. It's a very different mental model, and I've seen businesses make some very poor implementation decisions based on some poor understanding of what this system aims to be. That in turn adds to a bad consumer impression, a growing body of bad examples for others to look to and replucate, and it all just compounds.
by araes | 2025-08-09 19:28:09+00:00
Neat site with some interesting insights into the current state of media. Be cool if they turned it into a larger scale project with long running updates and statistics on search behavior and categorization. Seems like there's other time varying trend stuff that could also be visualized with this type of colorized, overlapping, stock trade volume visualization style.

Few of the categories are a bit questionable. The Social Events stuff seems to have a lot of stories that would have been better in the Violence section and would have made the trends somewhat clearer.

Example, if McDonald Shooting, Florida Bomber, Austin Bomber, Parkland Shooting, Capital Gazette Shooting, and Synagogue Shooting are put into a category of "Violent Crime" then the trend and shape are much clearer. Sharp spike of maybe a day, with rapid roll-off and rarely more than a day or two of media traction.

However, in the current setup, the shapes are distorted by the mystery of "The Disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi", and the long term criminal justice of "Larry Nassar Sentencing" and "Cristine Blasey Ford's Hearing", making the categories seem like long term attention. Yet the correlation is for slowly unraveling mysteries with multiple info releases and several "twists".

The environment and science stuff is interesting, just because you can see why news doesn't print much. Very little long term traction with the current reporting style. Somebody announced something, or a report got released, very little long term follow through, discussion, or mystery involved. "There's a climate report, it says there's a dire risk. Done."

Politics was a bit surprising with how little traction there was. It "seems" like politics, elections especially would have longer term search interest, yet the only stuff that got much was NAFTA, Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation, and the Migrant Caravan. Space Force got a little bit of long term.
by Sesse__ | 2025-08-09 19:28:13+00:00
> We are talking about an insane amount of data here. It was 56 Gbit/s. This is not something a "caching server" could handle.

You are not talking about an insane amount of data if it's 56 Gbit/s. Of course a caching server could handle that.

Source: Has written servers that saturated 40gig (with TLS) on an old quadcore.
by croes | 2025-08-09 19:28:21+00:00
Your word analogy is wrong.

It‘s not eat : rape, it‘s eat: fuck, so for some the equivalent for rape is eating meat or more specific killing animal : rape.

We evolved to eat and we evolved to fuck.

But like sex doesn’t mean rape so does eating not necessarily mean meat or at least no much and not without consideration who the animal is raised before we kill and eat it.

A long time in many societies we didn’t really care what women felt during sex or if they were even willing to.

But we evolved further and learned women have the same rights as men and rape is a bad thing. We even redefined what is considered rape. It’s not that long ago that raping your wife was impossible from a legal point of view.

We also changed our view on factorial farming, at least many of us. At least we want meat from a happy cow that lived on the pasture and not penned up in the barn without sunshine. The next step isn’t that far, no animal should be killed if nutrition is possible otherwise. We already spare some animals as food. In the west it’s cats and dogs, in India cows. And some include all animals in the don‘t eat category.
by Mars008 | 2025-08-09 19:28:24+00:00
There was a 'barrier' somewhere between Mexico and South America where sterile male flies were regularly released. They outnumbered natives and stopped reproduction cycle. Till recently. Now without control flies spread north into their historical territory. With warming climate they can spread even further.

Wiki has a bit of info on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax
by hetelek | 2025-08-09 19:28:30+00:00
Features:

* Enter different assets, expected growth, and simulate how it affects the total portfolio.

* Sharing portfolios via URL.

* Pie chart of portfolio breakdown.

Here's mine, curious to see others! https://anotherchart.com/?d=zN4IghiBcDa0gKgZQDIEEQBoCMAGLuMA...
by esafak | 2025-08-09 19:28:33+00:00
It is easier to understand additive primaries through a chromaticity diagram. You can form colors by mixing the primaries, and the gamut is determined by the hull of the primaries. Obviously you need at least three of them to enclose a space.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIE1931xy_gamut_comp...
by amtamt | 2025-08-09 19:28:37+00:00
Two kids in 4 to 16 range, and two adults in 30 to 46 age ranges have been using Debian on daily basis for almost a decade now. At least three of them are pretty "average home user". There has been forced use of windows (since school and employers wanted), but for home use Debian has always been better due to less maintenance needs and no distractions.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-08-09 19:28:52+00:00
I’m finding agentic coding to be a fascinating tool. The output is a mess but it takes so little input to make something quite functional. I had an app that I wrote with a python GUI framework I didn’t quite like. ChatGPT rewrote it to use GTK and it is so much faster now. Later Claude added a browser mode where the app can be run via GTK or a browser tab. I have never written a GTK app in my life past some hello world text box.

The output is very problematic. It breaks itself all the time, makes the same mistakes multiple times, I have to retread my steps. I’m going to have it write tests so it can better tell what it’s breaking.

But being able to say “take this GTK app and add a web server and browser based mode” and it just kinda does it with minimal manual debugging is something remarkable. I don’t fully understand it, it is a new capability. I do robotics and I wish we had this for PCB design and mechanical CAD, but those will take much longer to solve. Still, I am eager to point Claude at my hand written python robotics stack from my last major project [1] and have it clean up and document what was a years long chaotic prototyping process with results I was reasonably happy with.

The current systems have flaws but if you look at where LLMs were five years ago and you see the potential value in fixing the flaws with agentic coding, it is easy to imagine that those flaws will be addressed. There will be higher level flaws and those will eventually be addressed, etc. Maybe not, but I’m quite curious to see where this goes, and what it means for engineering as a human being at these times.

[1] https://github.com/sequoia-hope/acorn-precision-farming-rove...
by jchw | 2025-08-09 19:29:02+00:00
Agreed. In practice, SOAP was a train wreck. It's amazing how overly complicated they managed to make concepts that should've been simple, all the way down to just XML somehow being radically more complex than it looks to the wacky world of ill-defined standards for things like WSDLs and weird usage of multi-part HTTP and, to top it all off, it was all for nothing, because you couldn't guarantee that a SOAP server written in one language would be interoperable with clients in other languages. (I don't remember exactly what went wrong, but I hit issues trying to use a SOAP API powered by .NET from a Java client. I feel like that should be a pretty good case!)

It doesn't take very long for people to start romanticizing things as soon as they're not in vogue. Even when the painfulness is still fresh in memory, people lament over how stupid new stuff is. Well I'm not a fan of schemaless JSON APIs (I'm one of those weird people that likes protobufs and capnp much more) but I will take 50 years of schemaless JSON API work over a month of dealing with SOAP again.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-09 19:29:06+00:00
Hopefully i386 (or perhaps a new i386-like port with added support for 64-bit time values) can move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure for Debian 14 (forky) or Debian 15 (duke). Debian Ports has a m68k port, so supporting one for i386 shouldn't be a huge problem.
by josteink | 2025-08-09 19:29:13+00:00
> Should his contributions to open-source projects be rejected?

As someone whose attitude towards open-source is that it's the code who should do the talking, and not who contributed it (nor the colour of their skin, or their sexual orientation, etc) ... I'd say he should be able to contribute code, as long as the code is good enough. Same rule as every other code-contribution.

But the Debian-project has made the decision to elevate him and have him represent Debian at conferences like DebConf, and that strikes me as something some people might find more objectionable.

Even after having served his time, there's still a certain stain there, and it's up to the Debian project to what degree they want that stain to reflect on them as well.
by accrual | 2025-08-09 19:29:41+00:00
> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user

I think that's fine for Debian. Maybe even a good thing.

Debian supplies a rock solid base for many general purpose tasks. Ubuntu and other distros are free to package that up in a user friendly way, but as a technical user I want to be able to go upstream and get a basic Linux system without extra stuff.
by morkalork | 2025-08-09 19:29:53+00:00
Wow, interesting. Do students take that into account when selecting which CEGEP to attend?

I don't know how it is in Ontario now, but when I went through HS there university admissions were your top-K grades for the last couple of years and they didn't factor in which school you attended. There were no shortage of private/alternative high schools in Toronto that catered gaming that system with lax workloads and inflated grades.
by themafia | 2025-08-09 19:30:40+00:00
MDN does a pretty good job anyways. Perhaps I feel that it would be in keeping with that spirit to have this condition documented. This is partly because MDN is far easier to read for the purposes of _reference_ than the spec which is easier to read for the purposes of _implementing_. It's also easier to search and to share links to, as the link you presented earlier was both wrong and confusing, and there was no natural way to link to the part of the document you intended.

Perhaps the spec isn't the right tool for every job? That's why, for me, at least.
by minimaxir | 2025-08-09 19:30:44+00:00
Personally I've been wanting to blog more about new AI trends but at the rate AI trends are evolving it's unexpectedly hard to keep up while also having a full-time job while still maintaining good writing quality. The few blog posts I've written about this year have only because there has been significant overlap with my work for my full-time job.

Also, with social media becoming increasingly broken, the distribution of non-hype AI blog posts is entirely dead outside of the coin flip of getting the post to the top of Hacker News, which is less rewarding. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.
by mgh2 | 2025-08-09 19:30:49+00:00
Aside from "success", it is very reasonable to want to admit "well-rounded" or "balanced" individuals as net pluses to society.

I heard the lack of balance in the Bay Area: "wierdos, tech bros, etc.". A geek can contribute either very positively or very negatively to society (ex: tech CEOs, unabomber, etc.),

Maybe too young to judge at university admissions, but still a reasonable proxy (another topic).
by alephnerd | 2025-08-09 19:31:45+00:00
> the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed

Ranchers that can support large herds (2,000+) are those who earn a net profit [0] and are consolidating because processors do not want to support small farms.

While environmental factors do play a role, saying it's the primary reason is greenwashing of the real oligopolies tendencies arising in American Ag industry.

[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
by ACS_Solver | 2025-08-09 19:32:33+00:00
Writing this from my Debian system, it's a great distro that has been excellent to me as a daily driver. I switched to Debian 6 after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.

I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology, how it's a distro of free software by default but it also makes it easy to install non-free software or firmware blobs. I like Debian's package guidelines, I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front. I like the stable/testing package streams, which make it easy to choose old but rock-stable vs just a bit old and almost as stable.

And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.
by josteink | 2025-08-09 19:33:13+00:00
Don't feed the troll, etc... But I just had to bite on this bit:

> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.

It's true that Ubuntu used to be the OOB ready version of Debian, which "just worked", while base Debian took look of fiddling to even have wifi working.

These day though I find the opposite to be true: Ubuntu does lots of weird things I don't want, and I have to "fiddle" to disable all that. A base Debian install however (ISO with firmware bundled), just works.

For me, Ubuntu is officially off my list of distros I bother spending my time on.
by mac-mc | 2025-08-09 19:33:45+00:00
The top 3 things about bad weather places is water / moisture, dirt / sand and road salt. That causes extended wear and body damage over time which leads to cars not lasting as long as a population in the area. It's not the cold and if you keep it dry, clean, sealed and well maintained then you can avoid the issue, it's just a lot of work and nobody does it.
by isoprophlex | 2025-08-09 19:34:33+00:00
I've just watched our new lord and saviour, GPT-5 in agent mode, enter a death loop of frustration. I asked it to find an image online. Ostensibly an easy task...

First it spent three minutes getting fucked by cookie banners, then it ddossed Wikipedia by guessing article names, then it started searching for stock photo sites offering an API, then it hallucinated a python script to search stock photography vaguely related to what i wanted. This failed as well, so it called its image generator and finally served me some made up AI slop.

Ten minutes, kilowatts of GPU power, and jack shit in return. So not even the shiny new tools are up to the task.
by hinkley | 2025-08-09 19:34:34+00:00
Sooner or later, I end up with a coworker or two who takes it for granted that my code is usually very solid (a bit too solid according to some). I end up with a bug in production that was way too dumb not to catch it in review, and the reviewer confesses to not looking very closely at the code.

I think of that every time people talk about trusting generated code. Or the obfuscated code competition. It’s going to get you into the dumbest trouble some day.