MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rpdillon | 2025-09-05 17:01:52+00:00
What a great question! There is no complete answer, but I've been studying this for years. My position often comes off as anti-artist, because folks combine "I want artists to get paid" with "Copyright should be respected": this is a cognitive error: wanting to solve a problem is different than advocating for a particular solution. I'm particularly prone to criticizing solutions that have proven ineffective.

But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air".

https://lewishyde.com/common-as-air/

In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that.

William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as:

> Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work.

Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as:

> The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199760098
by antonymoose | 2025-09-05 17:02:00+00:00
That’s the sad part of all this that enrages me, we deport a dishwasher or a roofer but the criminals getting rich off of their exploitation get off free in virtually all cases.

Locally, we had an HSI raid on a business that had 10+ illegal underage workers living in an illegal bunkhouse built in the back of their building.

No criminal charges for the owner or any managers, no fines that have been reported for the numerous amount of code violations in their flophouse, and every day I drive by the building on my way to work and a 100k truck + very expensive boat are parked out front.

It’s an affront to justice to see these crooks getting rich and laughing to the bank!
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-05 17:02:11+00:00
Yeah I don’t think they’re going to have much of a choice unless they plan on doing gig jobs indefinitely. The software business has given a lot of people the impression that they’re far more special than they actually are.

I’ve seen devs say they’d pick up a trade like being a plumber or electrician because their their master electrician cousin gets paid a ton money, probably they imagine for wiring up new residential buildings and changing out light sockets… how long did it take that cousin to get there? In any trade, there’s quite a number of years of low pay, manual labor, cramming into tight spaces in hot attics or through bug infested crawl spaces, factory basements, etc. that most apprentices complete in their early twenties. Nobody gives a shit what you did as a developer and nobody gives a shit how good you are at googling things in most blue collar work environments. Getting experienced enough to have your own business making good money in some job where you need many thousands of work hours to even take a test to get licensed isn’t a lateral move from being a JS toolchain whiz. Even in less structured jobs like working as a bartender — it takes years of barbacking, serving, or bartending in the least desirable jobs (events, corporate spaces) before you get something you can pay rent with.
by flail | 2025-09-05 17:02:33+00:00
We have this saying: Our clients always know what they want. Until they get it. Then they know they wanted something different.

And don't take that as a complaint. It's a basic behavioral observation. What we say we do is different from what we really do. By the same token, what we say we want is different from what we really want.

At a risk of being a bit sarcastic: we say we want regular exercise to keep fit, but we really want doomscrolling on a sofa with a beer in hand.

In the product development context, we have a very different attitude towards an imagined (hell, even wireframed) solution than an actual working piece of software. So it's kinda obvious we can't get it right on the first attempt.

We can be working toward the right direction, and many product teams don't even do that. For them, development speed is only a clock counting time remaining before VCs pull the plug.
by klipt | 2025-09-05 17:02:34+00:00
> "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.

Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.

Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.
by msarrel | 2025-09-05 17:02:36+00:00
Me and the other nerds used to send each other notes written in Morse code in high school.

This site is timely. Just the other day I turned on the emergency setting on my flashlight and thought oh that's an interesting pattern. Why would it flash three long then three short then three long? About 30 seconds later I realized that I had forgotten an entire alphabet.
by _paulc | 2025-09-05 17:02:38+00:00
If you need GPIO support on a mini-PC you can just use a cheap FT232H breakout [1] with either PyFTDI [2], which supports pretty much all the protocols you need (UART/GPIO/SPI/I2C), or alternatively use CircuitPython with Blinka [3] which gives you access to the CircuitPython drivers etc.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 [2] https://pypi.org/project/pyftdi/ [3] https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-any-computer-wit...
by em-bee | 2025-09-05 17:02:44+00:00
i can pretty much agree with that. while my comment focuses on the negative "the US will be less relevant", yours focuses on the positive. but they are both possible at the same time. heck, being less relevant may even be a positive in itself.

the current events provide a wakeup call that has the potential to galvanize change. as i said, what we need is a consensus. hopefully the next government will realize that too, and work towards that. otherwise it is up to us individuals to work on that too.
by BeetleB | 2025-09-05 17:03:34+00:00
Oh yeah. I spent years in grad school and dropped out without completing, but it was totally worth it, because I got to study stuff I was really interested in.

Definitely don't do a PhD if you're not crazy interested in the topic. It's not worth it otherwise.

The difficult thing is for people like me: I needed perhaps 2 more years to finish the PhD, but I was getting a strong sense that I wouldn't get the career I wanted - so I quit. Those extra 2 years would not have increased my knowledge significantly, but for many, it's hard to justify quitting ("if I don't get the PhD, then all those years would have been wasted!")

When I went into industry, I got a first hand look at the job I would have had if I completed the PhD. Very grateful I quit. Crappy, crappy job.
by guzik | 2025-09-05 17:03:37+00:00
We thought for a long time about using protobufs in our product [1] and in the end we went with JSON-RPC 2.0 over BLE, base64 for bigger chunks. Yeah, you still need to pass sample format and decode manually. The overhead is fine tho, debugging is way easier (also pulling in all of protobuf just wasn't fun).

[1] aidlab.com/aidlab-2
by mullingitover | 2025-09-05 17:03:43+00:00
> A nation cannot thrive with too many conflicting demographics. Multiculturalism working to the degree people want it to these days is a total fantasy.

Absolute howler.

It's a (pretty white supremacist-coded) fantasy to say that immigrants don't assimilate. They typically assimilate better than native-born citizens! Meanwhile the most economically dominant states are extremely ethnically diverse, and have been for the past century.

> People coming here and extracting value from the economy to send home is also a problem.

Another example of what would be a knee-slapper if it were a joke, but it is actually white supremacist dog whistle. Immigrants are an absolute boon. For example, per the Congressional Budget Office[1]:

> CBO estimates that the immigration surge will add $1.2 trillion in federal revenues over the 2024–2034 period.

This nativist dreck that has infected the country through algorithmic social media is going to wreck the future of the country, and the sad part is that the declining fortunes it causes will still be wrongfully blamed on immigrants.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569
by perching_aix | 2025-09-05 17:03:44+00:00
> The tone of the CVE docs are because people freak out about CVEs flagged by automated tools when the CVEs are for issues that have no security impact for typical usage of SQLite, or have prerequisites that would already have resulted in some form of compromise.

The CVE docs:

> The attacker can submit a maliciously crafted database file to the application that the application will then open and query

This is exactly the normal use case GP talks about with application file formats.
by simsla | 2025-09-05 17:04:07+00:00
I was just thinking about how LLM agents are both unabashedly confident (Perfect, this is now production-ready!) and sycophantic when contradicted (You're absolutely right, it's not at all production-ready!)

It's a weird combination and sometimes pretty annoying. But I'm sure it's preferable over "confidently wrong and doubling down".
by teucris | 2025-09-05 17:04:17+00:00
I think there’s a bit of parroting going around but LLMs are predictive and there’s a lot you can inuit a lot about how they behave just on that fact alone. Sure, calling it “token” prediction is oversimplifying things, but stating that, by their nature, LLMs are guessing at the next most likely thing in the scenario (next data structure needing to be coded up, next step in a process, next concept to cover in a paragraph, etc.) is a very useful mental model.
by bradfa | 2025-09-05 17:05:12+00:00
Reliable in what way? The Raspi 5 PCIe interface to NVMe is only a single gen2 lane (5Gb/s physical, 4Gb/s data due to 8b10b encoding) but that's still plenty fast for lots of uses. I've had no problems using a Samsung NVMe with a 3rd party NVMe hat for the past few months. You can boot directly from the NVMe so you don't also need an SD card.
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-05 17:05:28+00:00
Also where I live (a karst region) other expensive things we deal with are frost lines (frost heave is a real issue; water expands as it freezes, things in the ground don't stay in the ground if ice is expanding into their space) and limestone rock underfoot (sinkholes are a real issue; dig wrong or too deep or not carefully enough and cave in the ground right under you, or worse, someone's house right next to you).

Google Fiber wrecked entire city streets relearning these things the dumbest way possible (then left the street repair bills to the us the taxpayers, because of course they did).
by com2kid | 2025-09-05 17:05:34+00:00
> Most Mac users I see using it struggle to see the difference between "image" and "container". Complete lack of understanding.

Because they just want their software package to run and they have been given some magic docker incantation that, if they are lucky, actually launches everything correctly.

The first time I used Docker I had so many damn issues getting anything to work I was put off of it for a long time. Heck even now I am having issues getting GPU pass through working, but only for certain containers, other containers it is working fine for. No idea what I am even supposed to do about that particular bit of joy in my life.

> All the same stuff can easily be done from cli.

If a piece of technology is being forced down a user's throat, users just wants it to work and go out of their way so they can get back to doing their actual job.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-09-05 17:05:35+00:00
You can treat that, and scientist often do treat it, as a stationary system with some error bounds.

For example, the concept of homeostasis in biology is like this. Lots of things are happening inside the living body, but it's still effectively at a functional equilibrium.

Similarly, lots of dynamic things are happening inside the Sun (or any star), but from the perspective of Earth, it is more or less stationary, because the behavior of the sun won't escape some bounds for billions of years.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-05 17:05:42+00:00
splice / vmsplice with pipes would probably be the fastest for the use case of file -> pipe -> user-space -> CPU processing. Problem is, you eventually have to access user-space memory to count integers, which breaks the zero-copy advantage for this workload. It probably won't beat the already vectorized O_DIRECT method.

What about direct-access hardware with DMA to CPU caches (NUMA-aware / cache-pinned)? PCIe NVMe controllers can use DMA to user-space buffers (O_DIRECT or SPDK) and if buffers are pinned to CPU local caches, then you can avoid main memory latency. It does require SPDK (Storage Performance Development Kit) or similar user-space NVMe drivers, however. IMO this is likely faster than io_uring + O_DIRECT, especially on large datasets, the only problem is that it requires specialized user-space NVMe stacks and careful buffer alignment.

You could also aggressively unroll loops and use prefetch instructions to hide memory latency, i.e. SIMD / AVX512 vectorization with prefetching. The blog post used AVX2 (128/256-bit) but on a modern CPU, AVX512 can process 512 bits (16 integers) per instruction and manual prefetching of data can reduce L1/L2 cache misses. I think this could beat AVX counting from the blog.

As for MAP_HUGETLB, 4KB page faults add overhead with a normal mmap. You want to map large pages (2 MB / 1 GB) which means fewer page table walks and reduced TLB misses reduced, meaning on a 50 GB dataset, using hugepages can reduce kernel overhead and speed up mmap-based counting, but it is still likely slightly slower than O_DIRECT + vectorized counting, so disregard.

TL;DR:

I think the faster practical CPU method is: O_DIRECT + aligned buffer + AVX512 + unrolled counting + NUMA-aware allocation.

Theoretically fastest (requires specialized setup): SPDK / DMA -> CPU caches + AVX512, bypassing main memory.

Mmap or page-cache approaches are neat but always slower for large sequential workloads.

Just my two cents. Thoughts?
by fortran77 | 2025-09-05 17:06:26+00:00
Yes! I love Morse. I copy in my head and I send with an Iambic paddle and straight key.

I like to be able to build the smallest possible radios--and nothing's simpler than a CW transmitter. I have a 5 watt transceiver (based on a Si48xx rx chip) that fits in an altoid tin I use when I travel. Hang a wire off the hotel balcony (I have a mini EFHW tuner, too) and start making contacts.

I've been an "extra" since 1977, so we had to learn code back then. I also have the (now-obsolete) first class radiotelegraph licence where I had to copy code at an FCC field office at 25 WPM for 5 minutes in order to pass....
by al_borland | 2025-09-05 17:06:27+00:00
I got a new car a couple years ago. I purposefully bought the end of the model year before a major refresh, because the new model was going to add a giant touch screen with more touch-control. I didn’t want that.

I ditched the smart watch and went back to mechanical and quartz watches that just tell the time.

I still don’t really get most of the smart home stuff. My dad is really into it, and it all seems so annoying. He can’t even unlock his front door without using his phone, or he’ll have to recalibrate the lock.

I think there is a lot of value in tactile controls and feedback, and so much of that has been stripped out of our lives. I try to hang onto it and get it back where I can. The same goes for purely mechanical devices that work today and will work in 100 years. Those are the best.

I’m also so tired of charging stuff. As well as tired of buying products that turn into e-waste when the battery loses its ability to hold a change. It seems like user-replaceable batteries should be a hard requirement on everything.
by yencabulator | 2025-09-05 17:07:21+00:00
Also great for "eyeball auditing". When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell.

With ledger/hledger, I've never felt unsure about the change I'm making, and if something wipes out records I'll notice it before committing.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-05 17:07:54+00:00
> There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow.

Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).

So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-05 17:07:54+00:00
“of Arts” comes from the Liberal Arts, the seven traditional fields covered in medieval universities, the Bachelor of Arts being the basic degree in medieval universities, the Master of Arts being the subsequent degree which also conferred the qualification to teach the liberal arts, and after those degrees were doctoral degrees in the “higher faculties” of Law, Medicine, and Theology.

While no longer using the Trivium and Quadrivium comprising the traditional Liberal Arts as the sum of the programs, the name of the degrees has been retained widely, and used for degrees in almost any field of study, even while some institutions also offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with other styles (particularly “of Science”). There is no consistent meaning or differentiation to the “of Arts” or “of Science” styles, though they may have signify institution-specific differences in curriculum at some institutions.
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-09-05 17:08:39+00:00
Containers and container orchestrators are complex tools. The constant cost of using them is pretty high compared to bash scripts. However the scale / maintenance factor is significantly lower, so for a 100 boxes simplicity of bash scripts might still win out over the containers. At 1000 machines it is highly likely that simplest and least maintenance overall solution will be using an orchestrator.
Ask HN: What are the best biographies of the firm?
by miletus | 2025-09-05 17:08:52+00:00
Some firms have written internal histories that read almost like biographies. For example, McKinsey’s Perspective on McKinsey (Marvin Bower) and Sequoia’s history.

These are very different from founder biographies or outsider case studies — they’re written from within, capturing the firm’s self-image, values, and evolution.

What other great examples exist?
by bloppe | 2025-09-05 17:09:21+00:00
Protobuf's main design goal is to make space-optimized binary tag-length-value encoding easy. The mentality is kinda like "who cares what the API looks like as long as it can support anything you want to do with TLV encoding and has great performance." Things like oneofs and maps are best understood as slightly different ways of creating TLV fields in a message, rather than pieces of a comprehensive modern type system. The provided types are simply the necessary and sufficient elements to model any fuller type system using TLV.
Show HN: Open-sourcing our text-to-CAD app
by zachdive | 2025-09-05 17:09:35+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Zach from Adam (https://adam.new/). We’re building an AI co-pilot for mechanical CAD software.

As part of our broader research, we built a browser-based Text-to-CAD app (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182206) and are now open sourcing it. This is a React SPA with a Supabase backend.

What it does:

* Generates parametric 3D models from natural language descriptions, with support for both text prompts and image references

* Outputs OpenSCAD code with automatically extracted parameters that surface as interactive sliders for instant dimension tweaking

* Exports as .STL or .SCAD

Under the hood:

* Separate agents for conversation and code generation; simple parameter tweaks bypass AI entirely using deterministic regex-based updates

* Runs fully in-browser by compiling OpenSCAD to WebAssembly and integrating Three.js with React Three Fiber for 3D rendering

* Supports BOSL, BOSL2, MCAD libraries and custom font support (Geist) for text in models

We’ve seen many developers trying to replicate this kind of functionality, so we’re releasing this to give the community a solid foundation to build on.

Future improvements:

* Expand geometry support - Move beyond CSG primitives to support curved surfaces, fillets, lofts, and constraint-driven modeling through CadQuery/Build123D

* Better spatial context - UI for face/edge selection and viewport image integration to give LLMs spatial understanding

* Enhanced capabilities - RAG on documentation and integration with more OpenSCAD libraries for features like proper threading

You can clone the repo and run it locally! Contributions are welcome, and we’ll keep merging PRs as they come in.
by thibaut_barrere | 2025-09-05 17:09:50+00:00
Mode X allowed pretty cool stuff, like fake true color with interlaced lines (R,G,B), double buffering etc!

Fond memories.

Here is a YouTube rendition of a demo I implemented in 96, showing those techniques https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t8o-uuq73UU&pp=ygUQTmlra2kgaml...
by spit2wind | 2025-09-05 17:09:55+00:00
Interesting. I'm still working my way through Correct+Efficient+Beautiful. My takeaway so far has been that Modules _are_ the "O" part of OCaml. I guess there's something more "traditionally" an object? Does that mean there were modules in Caml (or whatever the predecessor was) and it was decided classes might be a good feature to add?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-05 17:10:05+00:00
The low hanging jobs historically created from progress are gone. You are talking nonsense. You are talking the equivalent of 'and then magically, new jobs appear, because jobs have appeared in the past'. And while you wave away job fears as a nothing burger, you randomly add in blaming people for not feeling rich because...they think progress should include their lives progressing for the better?