MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdponx | 2025-08-25 14:52:14+00:00
I'd rather have this file format with an incomplete reference and confusing implementation, than not have this file format at all. Parquet was such a tremendous improvement in quality of life over the prior status quo for anyone that needs to move even moderate amounts of data between systems, or anyone who cares about correctness and bug prevention when working with even the tiniest data sets. Maybe HDF5 and ORC would have filled the niche if Parquet hadn't, but I think realistically we would just be stuck with fragile CSV/TSV.
by quotemstr | 2025-08-25 14:52:46+00:00
74 KLOC for a decoder? That's ridiculous. Use invokedynamic. Yes, people more typically associate invokedynamic with interpreter implementations or whatever, but it's actually perfect for this use case. Generate the right code on demand and let the JVM cache it so that subsequent invocations are just as fast as if you'd written it by hand.

Jesus Christ this isn't 2005 anymore and people need to learn to use the real power of the JVM. It's stuff like this that sets it apart
by aabhay | 2025-08-25 14:53:05+00:00
Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering, so turns out AI wasn’t needed for software to take away jobs.

That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human contact as well.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-25 14:53:07+00:00
I prefer changing the battery once every three years over having a radioactive emitter strapped to my wrist. There is a decent case for nuclear pacemakers since changing the battery of those requires surgery, and even there it didn't get traction. Watch batteries are quick to change, I don't see the risk/benefit tradeoff working.

And with smart watches we are back in "useless for most applications" territory.
by xenotux | 2025-08-25 14:53:09+00:00
You can say that about 99% of the tech that people use today. Windows and MacOS don't serve you. Your browser doesn't serve you. Heck, Hacker News doesn't serve you - it serves a bunch of VCs!

But the reality is that most of the time, this is not an adversarial relationship; and when it is, we see it as an acceptable trade-off ("ok, so I get all this stuff for free, and in exchange, maybe I buy socks from a different company because of the ads").

I'm not saying it's an ideal state or that there are no hidden and more serious trade-offs, but I don't think that what you're saying is a particularly compelling point for the average user.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-25 14:53:22+00:00
You can — just drag the thumbnails.

The only downside to this, that I am aware of, is that a new PDF is created (rendered into a new PDF context). That can be lossy in some cases (if there are features that Preview does not support that get "dropped on the floor") and it is possible for the resulting PDF to be larger than the original(s).
by lproven | 2025-08-25 14:53:26+00:00
> Do any other companies do the same?

Important relevant note:

Some companies offer "DOS" or "FreeDOS" computers. This is notably common in poorer countries.

These commonly do not really run DOS. They run a very old version of FreeDOS in a VM under Linux. HP uses Debian.

https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...

1. When you look for Linux machines, look in other countries than your own.

2. Include machines described as DOS machines. They are really Linux machines and will run Linux fine because they in fact ship with it.
by sitkack | 2025-08-25 14:54:00+00:00
I agree as an art project of some sort.

My version of this would have agents that would categorize, collate and clean. Keeping the the habital spaces clean, perhaps showing things I should see. It might find things that are important (like tax documents, receipts, etc) and make sure that they are findable and archived properly.

I do find it very self centered in a way. Artists produce a lot of work, but to keep it from disappearing they are required to groom it with their attention? It leaves nothing for the future.

Yamato is a nihilistic aesthetic.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-25 14:54:15+00:00
Windows is actually much closer to this limited, meaningless, form of the "everything is a file" meme. In Windows literally every kernel object is a Handle. A file, a thread, a mutex, a socket - all Handles. In Linux, some of these are file descriptors, some are completely different things.

Of course, this is meaningless, as you can't actually do any common operation, except maybe Close*, on all of them. So them being the same type is actually a hindrance, not a help - it makes it easier to accidentally pass a socket to a function that expects a file, and will fail badly when trying to, for example, seek() in it.

* to be fair, Windows actually has WaitForSingleObject / WaitForMultipleObjects as well, which I think does do something meaningful for any Handle. I don't think Linux has anything similar.
by diggan | 2025-08-25 14:54:40+00:00
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year

There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on.

Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly.

> Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations

Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.
by ThomasGlanzmann | 2025-08-25 14:54:47+00:00
Mupdf searches large pdfs much faster. However since I switched to wayland/sway I also use zathura because cut & paste works. Mupdf is an X application but I still use it to search large pdfs. But there is also this plugin but I did not try hard enough to get it running: https://github.com/pwmt/zathura-pdf-mupdf. Under xorg worked cut & paste with mupdf.
by naasking | 2025-08-25 14:54:48+00:00
I think the signal-to-noise is demonstrably higher with AI than with a legion of monkeys on typewriters. I think an interesting philosophical question is, is there some threshold of signal-to-noise that by itself would qualify a system as "intelligent", or is "intelligence" some specific property of the search process itself? eg. perhaps real intelligence avoids certain pitfalls, like getting stuck in local minima.
by bpt3 | 2025-08-25 14:56:05+00:00
> So an "old classic" (I was thinking a Mercedes) stops being a luxury car as soon as a poor person inherits it? Do you see how nebulous these categories are? How easy it is to just move the line whenever it suits your argument?

No, it stops being a luxury car when it's old and no longer luxurious. Luxury cars are very expensive to maintain, and the poor person in question should absolutely sell a historic luxury car and buy a Honda Civic (or similar) and use the remaining funds for other essentials.

> I'll give you an economist who led the charge: Donald Regan, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the treasury and chief of staff. This was back in a time when people felt they needed to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse to strip poor people of their rights and keep them stuck in a cycle poverty. The banner was "Reaganomics", or "Trickle-Down Economics". You're so incredulous that the discipline of economics has anything to do with a class war that was largely started and still fought under the name "Trickle-Down Economics"?

So one guy (who wasn't an economist BTW) who died over 20 years ago and whose ideas have been long abandoned is your big example? Come on.

Your entire premise is ridiculous and your hyperfocus on blaming the rich for every ill in the world completely negates any shred of a valid argument you might have.
by diggan | 2025-08-25 14:56:29+00:00
Flashback to Sweden, around 2011 or so. Copyright owners convince the government to add a $/GB levy to digital storage mediums like USBs, just in case people would use it for storing copyrighted material. The kicker? Personally archiving copyrighted material to your personal storage is (was?) fully allowed by law, but somehow it went through anyways. Glad I don't live there anymore :)
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-25 14:56:36+00:00
This guy has been around forever, and my understanding was that he was extremely fringe and nobody took him seriously. So this article piqued my interest, because it would be worrying if his ideas actually started to gain a foothold in the mainstream.

So what are the claims exactly?

> But since Donald Trump’s re-election, Yarvin’s profile has grown exponentially. So has his influence, as his once-fringe ideas ... have gone from chatroom theory to something more like reality

Bold claim. And the evidence?

> Though Yarvin has never spoken with Trump, many of the president’s staffers are known to be avid followers and he is in contact with vice-president JD Vance, with whom Yarvin says he spoke in person about a month ago

Ah, as I expected, the proof here turns out to be absurd. "Staffers" (who we don't know the name of) are "known" (but we don't know by whom!) to be "avid followers" of him. And JD Vance "spoke in person" with him (but we don't know how many words were spoken, or if they agreed on anything!)
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-25 14:56:52+00:00
I think FT is passe, a lot of projects are using MTG

https://www.exxonmobilchemical.com/en/catalysts-and-technolo...

but still making methanol from syngas. Two attractive routes though are just using methanol or blending methanol into gas and turning the methanol to dimethyl ether.

I dunno if it is really practical but I like this image of this personal fuel synthesizer

https://www.carsauce.com/car-news/start-up-invents-home-petr...

which makes about a gallon a day which is about what my Honda Fit uses.
by kotaKat | 2025-08-25 14:56:54+00:00
Literally the same. Went to deploy a Windows 7 laptop for some Motorola software and documentation and went to download the latest Reader executable.

I was shocked when the offered executable for Windows 7 was the 600MB+ release and ended up dumping it for SumatraPDF myself.

8 MB is so much nicer than 600, especially on a laptop with only 1GB of RAM.
by louwrentius | 2025-08-25 14:57:00+00:00
I read 'Nuclear Batteries' and the first thing I think about is the "Lia Radological accident", where three men were exposed and one died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

This incident happened in the country of Georgia, which was part of the Sovjet Union. Which probably already hints towards the root-cause of this incident (they lost track of the devices).

Also: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-25 14:57:53+00:00
>Why is it that Android manufacturers just don't care? Is it too much work for a market of hundreds of thousands of users (and growing)?

It's the same reason car manufacturers basically dont care about your car once it drives off the dealership lot. Why Tesla continuing to update has been a new era of your car getting better after purchase giving Tesla a huge value advantage. Which later turned into a negative as they can decide to brick your car on a highway, but that's another discussion.

Whereas android auto was supposed to make the cars less obsolete from an infotainment pov anyway.

But also dont just jump to 'cost center' and corporate greed. They have a bigger problem to deal with. Aging batteries that take a beating from being dropped. Everyone drops their phone.

If they built these to last 10 years. The battery degradation of dropping to 50-70% original capacity would make their brand look bad. There would certainly be way more cellphones bursting and catching fire in public.

The balance is then in the pudding. Sell more every 3 years, or 5 or 7, and keep on the cutting edge.

This is also why there's no rush toward better batteries. If solid state batteries in cellphones become a thing, then replacing your cellphone may drop; and so will their bottom line.
by filoleg | 2025-08-25 14:58:37+00:00
> The Us has even higher limits - many things are banned to many adults. Alcohol, lottery tickets etc.

Not trying to start an argument, because I could indeed be missing some crucial info here, but what kind of adults aren't allowed to purchase alcohol or lottery tickets in the US?

The most scrutiny I ever got while attempting to purchase either alcohol or lottery tickets in the US was the establishment's employee glancing at my ID (and even that happens less than 1/5 of the time for me).
by j_w | 2025-08-25 14:59:13+00:00
You ask ChatGPT for answers to questions and your surprised that random terminal commands don't work? If you look at linux forums, all issues always include hardware and software versions. Some problems are extremely context dependent.

Hardware acceleration isn't working -> what GPU? Do you have the right drivers installed (yes for Linux this is a consideration as there are so many display configurations not all drivers cough nvidia work for all scenarios).

You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at. Is this 30% dropped frames at 4k60 or 1080p30? You can argue that this is too much detail for something that should "just work" but given where you are and what you're talking about I would think you would be more nuanced in the troubleshooting. If you want the most seemless and effort free web browsing and media viewing experience just buy a macbook air (good product and also good dev machines for most).
by lproven | 2025-08-25 14:59:21+00:00
There are 2 things here to note which explain why.

* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.

Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.

* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.

I speak as a former docs writer.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-25 14:59:49+00:00
Exactly. There is a reason for the push. The natural default of many engineers is to "do things properly", which often boils down to trying to guess all kinds of possible future extensions (because we have to get the foundations and the architecture right), then everything becomes abstracted and there's this huge framework that is designed to deal with hypothetical future needs in an elegant and flexible way with best practices etc. etc. And as time passes the navel-gazing nature of the project grows, where you add so much abstraction that you need more stuff to manage the abstraction, generate templates that generate the config file to manage the compilation of the config file generator etc.

Not saying this happens always, but that's what people want to avoid when they say they are okay with a quick hack if it works.
by linsomniac | 2025-08-25 15:00:01+00:00
>it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

IMHO, there's a strong case for the opposite. My vibe coding prompts are along the lines of "Please implement the plan described in `phase1-epic.md` using `specification.prd` as a guide." The specification and epics are version controlled and a part of the project. My vibe coded software has better design documentation than most software projects I've been involved in.
by monkey_monkey | 2025-08-25 15:00:26+00:00
They're not saying the Nazis are truly evil at all, they're just saying that the British people shouldn't have fought the Nazis or were hoodwinked by the govt.

The British were evil, the Chinese were evil, the Japanese were evil, the Belgians were evil, the Spanish were evil, the Incas were evil, the Mongols were evil, the French were evil, the Iroquois were evil, the ancient Egyptians were evil, etc etc etc.
by behnamoh | 2025-08-25 15:01:59+00:00
Ever since 3 years ago, every time I open a PDF in Preview it somehow scales it wrong, so swiping left and right jiggles the PDF... (Not that I swipe left/right intentionally, but that happens when swiping up/down). I alway have to zoom out a bit so the document correctly fits the screen and swiping left/right gets disabled.
by diggan | 2025-08-25 15:02:08+00:00
> A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.

Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to customize things. Generally just feels faster, which I guess is the most important thing about fast-food, I want to be in-and-out of there as quick as possible, the less humans I have to deal with, the better.
by itdann7 | 2025-08-25 15:02:19+00:00
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Privacy First – We never save your files, only templates.

Detailed Logs – Every request tracked for transparency.

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Smart Field Detection – Auto-detect form fields in any PDF.

Docs, Tutorials & 24/7 Support – Everything you need to get live fast.
by MisterTea | 2025-08-25 15:02:34+00:00
> object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object

That is why I love Plan 9. 9P serves you a tree of named objects that can be byte addressed. Those objects are on the other end of an RPC server that can run anywhere, on any machine, thanks to 9p being architecture agnostic. Those named objects could be memory, hardware devices, actual on-disk files, etc. Very flexible and simple architecture.
by filoleg | 2025-08-25 15:02:42+00:00
> If anything, it is in 4chan's interest to be banned by UK ISPs since this will induce the sale of a few more passes, which permit posting from VPNs.

I sense a bit of a flaw in this strategy, given that 4chan being banned in UK would presumably block any payments for passes from UK-origin banks/cards made to 4chan bank accounts as well.
by jerf | 2025-08-25 15:02:50+00:00
The analogy to the Dot Com bubble seems strong. Pretty much everything promised in the Dot Com bubble has come to pass. It just didn't come to pass on the time frame the stock valuations implied. And given that the time value of money is an exponential process and not just a linear one, missing by 10-15 years is missing by a lot.

I don't know that AI is going to miss in the same way by 15 years but I also don't see how it can possibly justify the promises implied by the current valuations and investments. A thing nobody wants to talk about is how quickly all the hardware that was so frantically purchased is depreciating, for instance. And even missing by 5 years with the exponential time value of money is still missing by a lot, although perhaps I won't italicize this particular "lot".
by hdbrill | 2025-08-25 15:03:40+00:00
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by bpt3 | 2025-08-25 15:04:14+00:00
> i write for me.

You sure use an awful lot of self-citations for someone who is only writing for themselves.

> I don't find most people in the USA to be worth taking seriously, either. Liiiike if someone thinks the primary purpose of police is something like "protecting and serving" vs. being deputized slave patrollers. How could I take that person seriously?

You realize you both can be wrong, correct? Because you absolutely are in most of the US, for starters.

> If I don't think political authority is real, and 90% of the us population does think it is real, and votes, I'm already out of sync with all of those people.

So you don't think political authority is real, yet you work with government authorities to enact the changes you want to see in your area?

I mean it makes sense to me to advocate for your preferred solutions to problems, but I think political authority is real (because it is, just look around you).

> And I've got at least one or two additional hot takes that could alienate another few percentage points.

Yes, it's very clear that pretty much everything you say is poorly thought out and researched and designed almost entirely to incite a strong reaction and attract attention. I agree with some of your claims and disagree with others, but there's no point in discussing any of them in depth with you.

What was your first claim again?
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-25 15:04:23+00:00
This is all a very sweet conversation of the many fold variability of so many things.

I find science and philosophy well grounded with the parsimony of reason.

Further, we are psycho spiritual creatures and a new age is upon us and things will never be the same.

https://anonpaste.com/share/the-secret-war-ca40445143
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-25 15:04:33+00:00
On long enough timescales, the most stable thing in the universe is the iron isotope 56Fe. All heavier atoms will decay to 56Fe, and all lighter atoms will eventually combine to form 56Fe via quantum processes, even at zero temperature. 10^15000 years from now, there'll be iron stars comprised almost entirely of 56Fe.
by taeric | 2025-08-25 15:06:36+00:00
Car ownership is still in the 80%s there, though? And I live in Seattle, which has even better numbers, from last I looked. Still, it is hard to find someone that makes more and doesn't drive fairly regularly. Even more so if you consider families. We were the odd 6 person family with a single car for a long time.

I am trying to be clear that I am not opposed to transit and such. As stated elsewhere, I went over a decade without a car in Atlanta, GA. And this is not including my time in college. So, I am all for it.

But I also remember a comedian saying "at least he was above the poverty line, I don't ride the bus." And my girlfriend at the time shot me a very nervous look because I did ride the bus. I happened to think the joke was hilarious. And it shaped a lot of what I paid attention to with regards to driving.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-08-25 15:06:49+00:00
>until it can finally stop

Pretty sure even that is still over-anthropomorphising. The LLM just generates tokens, doesn't matter whether the next token is "strawberry" or "\STOP".

Even talking about "goals" is a bit ehhh, it's the machine's "goal" to generate tokens the same way it's the Sun's "goal" to shine.

Then again, if we're deconstructing it that far, I'd "de-anthropomorphise" humans in much the same way, so...