MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Philpax | 2025-08-20 08:40:58+00:00
Hence the "if" :-)

ROCm is getting some adoption, especially as some of the world's largest public supercomputers have AMD GPUs.

Some of this is also being solved by working at a different abstraction layer; you can sometimes be ignorant to the hardware you're running on with PyTorch. It's still leaky, but it's something.
by philipallstar | 2025-08-20 08:41:28+00:00
> I challenge you reader to ask yourself, is the arbitrary line of humans vs non humans more justified than the equally arbitrary line of white humans vs non white humans?

I'll take it one step further. The fact that your immune system prioritises you over the life of a single bacterium is no different to the Holocaust. Provocative, but it does make us realise that we're walking gas chambers who should take immunosuppressants immediately.
by 0xEF | 2025-08-20 08:41:34+00:00
I wonder if part of the nuance here is understanding what language and communication are, respectively. I am definitely not in my own lame here, but at first glance of Great Ape Language Wikipedia article and some comments, it seems like that it is not addressed? My admittedly infantile assessment is this; all language is communication, but not all communication is language.

For example, I can issue a warning to another human by using the words "step back or there will be a problem." Assuming they also speak English, my structured sentence conveys the warning in a clear way.

My neighbor's dog can also issue a similar warning by growling as I move into it's space. It's not using any sort of structure or specific messaging, rather a universally understood sound that conveys some sort of feeling related to caution and fear.

I use the "warning" example since fear/caution are extremely powerful and seem easiest to convey across species. Again, not adept at this, so my example might be dumb. I'm super interested in understanding more about this, though.

Any suggestions of further reading?
by Myrmornis | 2025-08-20 08:41:41+00:00
Good luck, it would be fantastic if you can get it accepted as a mermaid alternative; it's much, much niceer than mermaid, both the visual result, and the language. I've used D2 heavily for a couple of years or so now. It's really fantastic. I hope you're paid product is healthy. Sequence diagrams are my most common diagram type by some way I think. And I seem to always use the sketch rendering over the last year.

While you're here, can I mention a feature request? I'd like to be able to put clickable hyperlinks into sequence diagram arrow labels (e.g. so I can link the message to where in the code it occurs).

Also, I'd like more control over vertical spacing in sequence diagrams, and perhaps the ability to define groups of columns (just visually grouped).
by mnw21cam | 2025-08-20 08:42:02+00:00
The best way to determine the exact position of a planet is not to have a highly calibrated telescope mount that knows exactly where it is looking. Instead, it is to take a decent picture with the planet approximately in the middle, and feed it into a piece of software that looks at all the surrounding stars (with known positions) and calculates the planet position from that.

Getting a telescope mount calibrated that well is nigh on impossible. Calculating position by relative position of nearby stars is incredibly accurate.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-20 08:43:11+00:00
That's is not a fair representation of the situation.

AI as a tool for software development is here and will continue to gain traction. Everyone recognises this.

But what is touted as "vibe coding" now is hype at best and misguided.

So I would instead argue that this is not the "innovator's dilemma" at all, and in fact AI is making headways everywhere, but instead this a classic hype cycle. Currently "vibe coding" might be peak hype, it will bring disillusionment when reality catches up, and so on as we go down the cycle.
by friendzis | 2025-08-20 08:45:13+00:00
There is a reason we tend to call "the new internet" "web 2.0": it's dominated by platforms. For better or worse, the dynamics are entirely different. In the new internet interactions are facilitated by the algorithm, whereas in the old internet it was a web of peers.

Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.
by a3w | 2025-08-20 08:48:43+00:00
In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting.

If their SEO ranking beats the official site, they could confuse the hell out of people. (And I am told people do not use uBlock or Pihole everywhere, so paid ads would work, too.)

They seem to leave the market, perhaps due to being sued they cannot make a profit: https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...
by Brajeshwar | 2025-08-20 08:48:49+00:00
Embarrassingly, I used to submit my own website’s article. A few of them have hit the front-page of Hacker News. I remember, once submitting it and waiting for it to hit, when it did, I recorded a video of the first few minutes. Then I went to sleep.

https://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-first-...

Now, I consider my site as something rather personal, bland, just my babbles, and kinda s**t compared to many of the ones that pops up on Hacker News.
by articsputnik | 2025-08-20 08:49:16+00:00
From the article:

> There's a lot of information out there, including from myself about the history and rise [2022], comparing it to an MVC-like approach, or explaining its capabilities. That's why in this article I focus on the why and showcase how to use it in a practical example in the next chapter.

[1] https://www.ssp.sh/blog/rise-of-semantic-layer-metrics/ [2] https://cube.dev/blog/exploring-the-semantic-layer-through-t... [3] https://cube.dev/blog/universal-semantic-layer-capabilities-...

My one line definition that I use atm:

> A semantic layer acts as an intermediary, translating complex data into understandable user business concepts. It bridges the gap between raw data in databases (such as sales data with various attributes) and actionable insights (such as revenue per store or popular brands). This layer helps business users access and interpret data using familiar terms without needing deep technical knowledge. https://www.ssp.sh/brain/semantic-layer#semantic-layer-defin...

Edit: I'm the OP.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-08-20 08:50:17+00:00
Back when I hosted my search engine on a PC out of my apartment, it survived several supposed HN death hugs.

Seems mostly to be a problem where your website is backed by a DBMS, especially when each page impression generates multiple queries. In that scenario, running out of connections probably isn't particularly difficult.

Only time I've actually been knocked offline was when Elon Musk tweeted a link to a blog post I made. That legit drove some real traffic. I'm not sure if it was the filedescriptor ulimit or the number of open connections that killed me, but I did actually blip for a few minutes.
Show HN: Live BTC Arbitrage Monitor (South Africa vs. Global)
by teruza | 2025-08-20 08:50:17+00:00
We built [ZArbitrage.co.za](https://zarbitrage.co.za) to track the live price gap between Bitcoin in South Africa and major international markets.

South Africa often trades at a premium (sometimes double-digit %), and while many people know about the "ZAR premium", there hasn’t been a simple, transparent dashboard showing it clearly over time.

The opportunity is also only available to South African Tax registered citizens, so that does limit the the number of people who can profit of this specific scenario. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to see a real live Arbitrage example that lasted for a decade.

The site shows: - Live BTC arbitrage opportunities (SA vs global) - Historical charts for spreads over time - Transparent data pulled directly from exchange APIs

This started as an internal tool for our own trading research, but decided to open it up for anyone interested in arbitrage, FX controls, and how capital restrictions create unique crypto pricing dynamics. Also, the opportunity is essentially dead as of a few months ago. Will it be back? Who knows...

Any feedback or comments are welcome. But it's mostly for fun, research and historical purposes. We hope someone out there finds it interesting or useful!
by hdvr | 2025-08-20 08:50:19+00:00
A few years ago, on my birthday, I quickly checked the visitor stats for a little side project I had started (r-exercises.com). Instead of the usual 2 or 3 live visitors, there were hundreds. It looked odd to me—more like a glitch—so I quickly returned to the party, serving food and drinks to my guests.

Later, while cleaning up after the party, I remembered the unusual spike in visitors and decided to check again. To my surprise, there were still hundreds of live visitors. The total visitor count for the day was around 10,000. After tracking down the source, I discovered that a really kind person had shared the directory/landing page I had created just a few days earlier—right here on Hacker News. It had made it to the front page, with around 200 upvotes and 40 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12153811

For me, the value of hitting the HN front page was twofold. First, it felt like validation for my little side project, and it encouraged me to take it more seriously (despite having a busy daily schedule as a freelance data scientist). But perhaps more importantly, it broadened my horizons and introduced me to a whole new world of information, ideas, and discussions here on HN.

Thank you HN for this wonderful birthday gift!
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-08-20 08:50:35+00:00
I remember a Rich Hickey talk where he described Datomic, his database. He said "the problem with a database is that it's over there." By modeling data with immutable "facts" (a la Prolog), much of the database logic can be moved closer to the application. In his case, with Clojure's data structures.

Maybe the the problem with CI is that it's over there. As soon as it stops being something that I could set up and run quickly on my laptop over and over, the frog is already boiled.

The comparison to build systems is apt. I can and occasionally do build the database that I work on locally on my laptop without any remote caching. It takes a very long time, but not too long, and it doesn't fail with the error "people who maintain this system haven't tried this."

The CI system, forget it.

Part of the problem, maybe the whole problem, is that we could get it all working and portable and optimized for non-blessed environments, but it still will only be expected to work over there, and so the frog keeps boiling.

I bet it's not an easy problem to solve. Today's grand unified solution might be tomorrow's legacy tar pit. But that's just software.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-20 08:50:41+00:00
The Mac way kind of depends on how you get your application. Sometimes applications come from the app store, sometimes they're ZIP'ed files that get auto-extracted, sometimes they're in DMGs that are mounted but not extracted, and sometimes they open some kind of install wizard.

Some of them you can open by right-clicking them and hitting open. Others just open directly. There are also apps that throw up an error when you try to open them and you need to go to the security settings to hit an oddly-placed button to open them. Whether or not you've managed to run the program at least once also seems to influence whether or not an app in the applications folder actually shows up in Launchpad.

Windows does half of this too these days, but these days every OS is confusing and needs specific know-how when you just want to run the tool you downloaded.
by deafpolygon | 2025-08-20 08:52:02+00:00
I tried Bases out but it's not suited for my uses. One issue I have with Bases, for any useful piece of information to be tracked underneath one subject -- you have to shard the data into tiny files which can then be used in the table.

Say you're setting up a media log of your engagements and you want to track completed season for a show-- if you're doing a handful of shows, this isn't a big deal. Over 100 shows, averaging 4 seasons -- that's 400 "completions", one file each. Plus another 100 files for the media metadata itself. That's 500 files that can be simply represented by 500 lines of a spreadsheet, even if you're duplicating title, year, etc. over and over.

The sharding of data into tiny files is what makes it difficult to use anywhere outside of Obsidian. If Obsidian Bases used the full power of YAML front-matter data properly, that'd be SO much better.

It's still faster, more efficient to use a spreadsheet. For anything more than what a spreadsheet can handle-- I would use SQLite.
by aa-jv | 2025-08-20 08:53:47+00:00
Very interesting article, and quite fun for those of us with a penchant for 8-bit aesthetics and retro-computing roots.

One thing that came to mind while reading this, was: isn't this just a human digital manifestation of Mother Nature's desire to just evolve everything into a crab shape?

Think about the symmetry and function of various appendages of the space invader, and how - eventually, all space invaders just look like crabs.

Are we seeing some sort of confluence in the Matrix here?
by qwertox | 2025-08-20 08:54:13+00:00
It's a valid point of view, but I don't see the value in sharing it.

There are enough people for who it's worth it, even if just for tinkering, and I'm sure you are aware of that.

It reads a bit like "You shouldn't use it because..."

Learning about Nvidia GPUs will teach you a lot about other GPUs as well, and there are a lot of tutorials about the former, so why not use it if it interests you?
by imtringued | 2025-08-20 08:55:26+00:00
I don't understand the problem. The incentives seem to be aligned.

The IdP company makes money off their security product. This means they are more likely to invest into security, because it's their business that is at stake.

Meanwhile the average company doesn't make money off a secure authentication flow. They make money from selling their SaaS product. Their goal is to spend as little on security as possible.
by deafpolygon | 2025-08-20 08:55:26+00:00
Same here, but the problem is bigger than that. Having to manage a ton of tiny files makes it easier to lose tiny bits of data. What happens if a file changes, gets overwritten and you don't notice? It's much easier to 'version' a single larger file than many hundreds (thousands?) of tiny files containing 4-5 lines at most.
by junon | 2025-08-20 08:55:37+00:00
Might also be card readers, debug servers, etc.

Could also be incompetence :D until I fixed it, deploying from my local machine rather than CD resulted in one of the baked in URLs being localhost rather than the public host on the project I'm working on now. Their local development server might just be at port 8888. Wouldn't surprise me.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-20 08:55:45+00:00
in short human exceptionalism became clear about 300 years ago, and has been becoming more clear with each succeeding year?

If so that is a relatively recent demonstration of exceptionalism. Given the long timeline of human existence it could even be argued that it is accidental that this proof of exceptionalism developed among the humans and not among some other species.

I actually believe in human exceptionalism, in that many of the features spread around various species are all found highly developed in the human, but really that is an argument for all species exceptionalism. There are very few species that do not some collection of interlocked traits that make them exceptional in some way, it just happens that our exceptionalism is one that allows for triumphalism at the same time.
by bashtoni | 2025-08-20 08:56:29+00:00
If it really is a single 100 page prompt then it will be even less reliable than a KPMG audit.

(See https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/12/kpmg-fined-... or https://pcaobus.org/news-events/news-releases/news-release-d... or https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017-142 or any of a myriad of other cases)
by wltr | 2025-08-20 08:56:32+00:00
You missed ‘I guess’ in the quote, but anyway. The idea is that the parent commenter said about the intent to sell the company, and I’ve got the impression it’s a day-one intention. Like, we’re building a company to sell it. So if I’m planning to do the opposite, deliver some actual value and ideally never sell it, what should I do then? Is it self-hosting then? That’s why I’m saying ‘I guess.’ It’s an open question.
by haritha-j | 2025-08-20 08:57:39+00:00
You think this is bad? Try getting visa for Europe within the UK as a citizen of a 3rd world country. The official process is through a service such as VFS, which is the most painful experience I've had with any sort of service. There are very few appointments, all of which are blocked out by 3rd party bots, which means you need to pay a 3rd party twice as much to get any appointment. The VFS website is riddled with bot deterrents that actuall just deter humans, such as entering your password through a non-qwerty, randomised, on screen keyboard. If you call their helpline, you get charged for it. Everything is an upsell. You fill in a pdf form, print it out, give it to them and then they look at the printed document and type it back into their computer. There are literaly queues of people standing on the street outside their offices because they offer no seating, like the queues outside a club. Oh and you have to submit biometrics every single time, and therefore go in person for these apponitments that are impossible to get. I once had to submit my biometrics thrice in the same year for italian visa
by rkomorn | 2025-08-20 08:57:41+00:00
That sounds right.

IME, though, the whole authorization system I've had to use with SEPA and IBANs feels more secure, and I've had no misgivings about using it to transfer or receive money.

By comparison, using ACH to transfer funds between accounts is usually bidirectional in bank apps, so if you give me your account info so I can send you money, I can also use that same info to withdraw money.

That means I'd never send you my routing and account number even if the original purpose is for you to send me money.
by nabla9 | 2025-08-20 08:58:13+00:00
Not mentioned, but obviously you don't need to read the whole book with same depth. Almost no book is must read from beginning to end. After skimming 3-5 hours, you can decide how much of it is important, or important to you and focus on those in deeper passes.

Active vs. Passive Reading https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/introduction/active-reading/

https://nesslabs.com/active-reading
by n4r9 | 2025-08-20 08:58:20+00:00
Agreed. I lean left on the UK spectrum and it was the first time I voted other than Labour in a GE. The walk-back on stuff like tuition fees and childcare was untenable, as was ordering MPs to stay away from picket lines. The nightmare continued with winter fuel payments, welfare "reforms" and a lack of leadership over small boats (which are not a pressing matter despite the frenzy being whipped up by Reform).
by reify | 2025-08-20 09:00:06+00:00
Team Zeteo

Judge Julia Sebutinde, a Christian Zionist, was the sole dissenting vote on the ICJ ruling on Israel's illegal occupation and the only one to vote against all six 'provisional measures' for Gaza.

she said, according to the independent Ugandan newspaper, the Daily Monitor. “I want to be on the right side of history.

I am convinced that time is running out…I am humbled that God has allowed me to be part of the last days." The legal world is now shocked all over again. What happens when a judge at one of the highest judicial offices in the world admits she has a religious duty to side with one of the parties in a dispute?

Can you imagine if a Muslim judge on the Court had said Allah told him to side with Palestine?

seems it can only be watched by subscribing to Zeteo for $8-11/month
by dgfl | 2025-08-20 09:00:53+00:00
What we’re exceptional at is survival. To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food. Also, citation needed on the complexity of whale songs exceeding the complexity of human language.

But besides, this is not the point. What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks to justify that we’re somehow a “disease” roaming the planet. As if a tapeworm that were to achieve total worldwide domination would stop and think “wait, I shouldn’t reproduce further because other creatures may suffer”. Same story with any other mammal.

The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species. Keeping the environment safe from us is extremely important, but undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species whose only virtue is being less successful at surviving than us is strange. With our own moral codes, no less.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-20 09:01:02+00:00
I use computers since 1986, UNIX in various flavours since 1992, GNU/Linux since 1995 starting with Slackware 2.0 (kernel 1.0.9, first ELF support), and to this day that is the usual answer in Linux forums.

Yet, other than the Netbooks glory days, I am yet to buy a Laptop, even from Linux shops, where everything is 100% supported, or eventually doesn't get broken in some kernel update.

I rather use the Linux kernel in the shape of Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux, or device specific ones like Raspberry or Cloud vendors sponsored distros, which they have to maintain themselves for their hardware.

Best of all, it all works on whatever I can get on Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Cool Blue, Conrad, Publico, Dixons,...
Founderly: An AI cofounder to take you from idea to launch
by arunbhatia | 2025-08-20 09:01:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I have been working on Founderly.xyz, a tool aimed at helping founders go from idea to product.

Many people have startup ideas but get stuck without a technical cofounder or the budget to hire one. Founderly tries to fill that gap by acting as an AI cofounder. Instead of a single assistant, it uses domain-specific agents (tech, design, marketing, legal) to help at different stages: • Idea → actionable plan • Plan → MVP • MVP → launch and early traction

We are opening early access soon: Founderly.xyz.

I would really appreciate feedback from this community - does this feel useful, and what would make it more valuable for someone starting out?
by shark1 | 2025-08-20 09:02:23+00:00
My Linkedin feed is very bad. I am ok in reading about interesting companies milestones or my contacts sharing opportunities or work related opinions. What I get is endless self-promotion and corporate bullshit. A place where everybody is the opposite of authentic, acting weirdly and cringe as they were being watched by co-workers and possible recruiters (and actually they are).
by ForHackernews | 2025-08-20 09:02:44+00:00
> AnduinOS has more than just cosmetic changes, though. It removes Canonical's controversial Snap packaging format and its supporting tools. It replaces it with Flatpak and the GNOME Software app store configured to show only Flatpak apps. AnduinOS uses native .deb packages throughout, including for Mozilla Firefox; it comes with no Flatpaks installed at all.

Sounds like a big win for those of us frustrated by Snap. Are there any other good Debian-derivatives with Flatpak? I suppose you can always add Flatpak on vanilla Debian.
by GJim | 2025-08-20 09:02:44+00:00
> A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.

Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.

Here, we prefer our police to be beholden to the public and obey the law; the spirit as well as the letter. It creates a trust that is clearly lacking with the (frankly thuggish) American police. To their clear detriment.