MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spacebanana7 | 2025-09-08 13:06:02+00:00
> "This is the automation of dependency hell. The problem is that not everything needs to be automated, especially hell. Dependency hell is a real thing which anyone who has worked on a large project has experienced. Projects having thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dependencies where you don’t know if they work properly, where are the bugs, you don’t how anything is being handled—it’s awful.

This the wrong thing to automate. You can do this manually, however it doesn’t stop you getting into hell, rather just slow you down, as you can put yourself into hell (in fact everyone puts themselves into hell voluntarily). The point is it makes you think how you get there, so if you have to download manually, you will start thinking “maybe I don’t want this” or “maybe I can do this instead”. And when you need to update packages, being manual forces you to be very careful."

I sympathise with this, but I have to respond that we have to live within existing ecosystems. Getting rid of npm and doing things manually won't make building SPAs have fewer dependencies, build would be incredibly slow and painful.
by acdha | 2025-09-08 13:07:13+00:00
So are companies (Itanium, Windows Mobile, etc.) but what governments do well is funding the competitive baseline needed for big advances. We live in an age of wonders invented based on American research investment in the mid-20th century, and that worked because the government did not try to pick winners but invested in good work by qualified people (everything NIH, NAF, etc. do by competitive grants) or by promising to pay for capabilities not yet available (a lot of NASA and military stuff).

Just like it doesn’t work to try an ecosystem based on one species, a society has to blend government and private spending. They work on different incentives and timeframes, and both have pitfalls that the other might handle better.
by patwolf | 2025-09-08 13:07:30+00:00
I wish the article had gone into detail about SoundFonts. I had an AWE64 back in the day, and the SoundFonts were a relatively inexpensive way to do sampling. CPUs were generally too slow to do sampling without dedicated hardware. I still remember the day I got the memory daughterboard and was able to load bigger SoundFonts.

I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.
by drclegg | 2025-09-08 13:08:17+00:00
It's pretty likely the guy blocked the author after seeing them link a blog post insulting his work, no?

Sure he should take the vulnerability report seriously, but it's pretty clear that bundling a report above the words "activism theater" isn't going to make someone want to read it.

Instead, just "hey man, you're on a vulnerable version of httpd" is likely going to be more effective.
by soulofmischief | 2025-09-08 13:08:19+00:00
I'm sorry, what?

There are billboards covering my local highway reminding me daily that I'm a racist antisemite because I don't support Israel's imperial occupation, political manipilation and wholesale genocide of Palestine civilians.

People in other cities who voice this same concern are getting kidnapped or become the subject of targeted harassment campaigns that include vans rolling around with the names and faces of dissenters hoping to inspire local stochastic terrorists to commit violence against them.

The federal government put out a memo attempting to ban government employees from using words such as "Black", "female", " marginalized ", "equality", "climate crisis", "sex", "victim" and more in their communications. [0]

Free speech is already dead, and is being held up in public like a puppet, brought out and paraded around when it serves the administration and then locked back in the basement when the day is over.

[0] https://archive.is/DL9dV
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-08 13:08:33+00:00
At least VMware isn't user-facing and it can be removed without riots. Imagine trying to tell someone they don't need Excel. I try to maintain at least plausible flexibility to go tell vendors to shove it, but if you have some enthusiastic fans of Microsoft Teams (they exist, who knew?)... Teams is one of those things that is inescapably tied to an incredibly deep well of platform lock-in.
by stackskipton | 2025-09-08 13:08:55+00:00
Ops person here, VMware is so embedded at these companies that switching away would be like Google saying, no more gRPC, everything is now SOAP. The amount of impacts is just too mind boggling to even consider.

2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware.

Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.
by jraph | 2025-09-08 13:09:09+00:00
The "code is data" aspect of lisp seems orthogonal to how code is still written as text, and btw lisp is still written using text. You still need to indent all these parentheses.

Virtually all programming languages are parsed into ASTs, and these ASTs can be serialized back. This is what formatters/"prettifiers" usually do.

Did I miss something?
by HPsquared | 2025-09-08 13:09:23+00:00
High-temperature reactor designs are essential. Radiative heat transfer scales with temperature to the fourth power.

So if you reject 100 MW of waste heat at, say, 400°C (750°F), a radiative heat transfer area of 10,000 m^2 (i.e. 100m x 100m square) would be sufficient. That's quite big and hot, but 100 MW is a lot!

Radiative heat rejection at 100°C would require 10x as much area.
by walterbell | 2025-09-08 13:09:34+00:00
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemcdowell/2025/08/31/broadc...

> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.
by pmarreck | 2025-09-08 13:10:04+00:00
There already is a (partial) solution to dependency hell: Nix.

It will at least massively help prevent things from breaking unexpectedly.

It won't prevent you from having to cascade a necessary upgrade (such as a security fix) across the entire project until resolution/new equilibrium is achieved.

My solution to the latter is simply to try to depend on as few things as possible. But eventually, the cancer will overtake the project if it keeps growing.

Source: Have worked on a million-LOC Ruby app
by karmakaze | 2025-09-08 13:10:32+00:00
The updated design of that state machine looks so bad I stopped reading there. Either the author isn't the best person to be making these arguments or are being disingenuous to support one.

I do agree with the overall take, "it depends" which is where you end up when you get enough experience and can also be able to articulate when/where and why. As others mention, I find that being able to represent invalid states (and function calls for that matter) in static types is well worth it up to a point.

The other thing I want to say is that you can have a state machine without a thing called a state machine, it's basically what the app is doing regardless so there's really no way of getting away from it, it's a matter of whether you build it with that clarity or not. For the record I prefer implementations that are state machines rather than ones that use an abstraction called a state machine (as the former is a 'zero cognitive-load' abstraction).
by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn | 2025-09-08 13:10:46+00:00
re corruption:

I was flying from Kathmandu to Bangkok in 2000 and I couldn't book a ticket on the plane until the day it flew as 'half the plane' was reserved for 'Government Officials' 'just in case'. Amusingly they were all on one side of the plane too, the side that can see Mount Everest during the flight.
by alexvitkov | 2025-09-08 13:11:26+00:00
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.

Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.
by brandhunt | 2025-09-08 13:11:31+00:00
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If you don’t own <YourBrand>.com, that email goes elsewhere:

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To a parked domain silently collecting mail.

To an attacker using it for phishing or fraud.

This isn’t hypothetical. Microsoft found 30,000+ corporate emails misdirected daily to parked domains. A Fortune 500 on .net lost bids when their .com owner received confidential RFPs.

Why It Happens Mail servers deliver based on MX records. If <YourBrand>.com has active MX servers, your sensitive emails go straight to them—no hacking required.

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by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-09-08 13:11:56+00:00
> genetically superior

Genetically and culturally. Here's the white supremacism in your first comment:

> a majority-Bangladeshi town or neighborhood where people behaved indistinguishably from people in Idaho, Wyoming, or Vermont

Immigrants want to actually keep their culture, and that's okay. They should be allowed to keep their culture, even if it is unfamiliar to white folk in Idaho.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-08 13:12:54+00:00
I think when people, particularly in America, think "protest", they think of people walking around with placards and other such relatively low effort involvement. That article is talking about incidents where you have 3.5% of people (that would be 12 million people in the US) engaging in things like organized and real boycotts (as opposed to 'Yeah I'm boycotting [this place I've never even heard of, let alone shopped at]), strikes, and so on.

You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care. But get 50,000 truckers (let alone 12 million people) to go on strike over something, and the whole country will grind to a halt.
by nextaccountic | 2025-09-08 13:12:56+00:00
So what? Are you arguing that ensuring patients have less information available about diseases leads to better outcomes? What's your take on public campaigns about self diagnosing mammary cancer by touch? (very common where I live)

As a patient I'd rather have more information available to me, even if I ultimately defer to specialists

Also it's common for medical professionals to ignore symptoms of certain demographics - in those cases, enabling patients to advocate for themselves is essential https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/well/mind/medical-gasligh...

A personal anecdote of mine was a friend that had abdominal pain for months. She had some comorbidities that made it easier for doctors to dismiss her symptoms. After visits to various doctors she only got adequate treatment because I went with her and advocated for her. After discarding multiple options eventually a renal infection was diagnosed and treated. If she went with the opinion of the first doctor she would still have the underlying condition untreated.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-08 13:13:38+00:00
You have so many negatives in your statement I had to read it 3 times as a native English speaker to realize it doesn't make sense. We can make cycling safer in multiple dimensions simultaneously: 1. we learn from the Dutch about infrastructure and integrating cycling into the transportation fabric (slow and expensive), 2. the Dutch start wearing helmets (fast and cheap).
by codethief | 2025-09-08 13:13:44+00:00
Ente can be self-hosted, too. The difference, either way, is that Ente is E2E-encrypted while Immich isn't. I don't trust myself enough to run a server no one will ever be able to break into (nor do I want to trust a third party with my photos), so E2E encryption is mandatory for me.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-08 13:14:04+00:00
> Many mid-market and regional operators

These aren't Broadcom's ICPs.

> Nutanix

Good for Nutanix. Market segmentation exists for a reason.

The article is also written by Steve McDowell, who's analyst firm (NAND Research) is sponsored by Nutanix [0][1]

Welcome to Enterprise Sales.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93FbVZGDXoY

[1] - https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix/technology/hype...
by 542354234235 | 2025-09-08 13:14:25+00:00
>You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days.

This is 100% false. I do gift card reselling and buy 6 figures worth of gift cards per year. Sometimes places like Dollar General require ID, but CVS, Staples, Grocery Stores, etc. almost never ask for ID. When they do it is to match to the name on the credit card to prevent people buying gift cards with stolen credits cards, not to enter into any sort of tracking database. You can easily buy hundreds of dollars of gift cards in a single transaction with no ID check if using cash.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-08 13:15:00+00:00
ISRU tends to make no sense at all when you have to move things from place to place, it makes more sense when you use them in place.

For instance there may be some usable ice at the moon's poles maybe even some carbon. You could get oxygen out of rocks one way or another. You could make rocket fuel and launch stuff the conventional way but there are two problems: (1) Earth is the most competitive and cheapest market for everything in the solar system, and (2) lunar colonists might see volatiles as precious and decide to circularize them rather than expend them. [1] [2] Contrast that to Earth which has plenty of volatiles.

There is the idea of O'Neill and Heinlein [1] of the lunar mass driver, the picture you get from The High Frontier and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that it looks like a maglev train a few km long is totally wrong because your elevation angle is pretty high if you want to target the Earth-Moon L1 point or the Earth or LEO (assuming you can aerobrake reliably) If it is a few km long it is a slanted hole a few km deep. I don't know about coilguns but a railgun with 2.5 km/s that would fit on a ship has been tested [3] and you need 3.5 km/s to get to L1 -- one way or another I think a viable mass driver looks like the Paris Gun and shoots small payloads. If you could launch a 1kg payload per second you could put up a rail car worth of material in a day.

O'Neill's students thought a lot about the "catcher" for stuff from the lunar mass driver and never came up with anything convincing if anybody else has I haven't seen it.

[1] See The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[2] Niven's Protector talks about the problem of very long-term space colonies , starships and stuff losing volatiles at steady rate no matter how well you try to keep them in.

[3] ... and burns up the barrels
by neom | 2025-09-08 13:15:59+00:00
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Gyoukou

"Each immersion tank can contain 16 Bricks. A Brick consists of a backplane board, 32 PEZY-SC2 modules, 4 Intel Xeon D host processors, and 4 InfiniBand EDR cards. Modules inside a Brick are connected by hierarchical PCI Express fabric switches, and the Bricks are interconnected by InfiniBand."
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-09-08 13:16:05+00:00
> Each dependency is a potential liability.

I mean, sure. So what does the solution look like? From my perspective it looks like a tool that is able to update your dependencies so that you can easily pick up bug fixes in your dependencies, which sounds an awful lot like a package manager.

> JavaScript is great example of this as there are multiple different package managers for the language (npm being one of the most popular), but because each package manager defines the concept of a package differently, it results in the need for a package manager manager.

This doesn't seem like a strong point to me. Yes, there are things like yarn, pnpm, etc. But IIUC practically all npm alternatives still define packages in the same way (a package.json at the root hosted by npmjs (or your private repo)), and the differences are ergonomic/performance related.

> [that each package manager defines the concept of a package differently] is why I am saying it is evil, as it will send you to hell quicker.

Then I think it's more of a language problem, not a problem with the concept of a package manager.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-08 13:16:09+00:00
Well... ideas are actually encoded (to some degree) in the words in the training data. So when they synthesize new text, they are, to a degree, synthesizing new ideas.

To a degree. The problem is that they don't actually understand the ideas in the training data. (Yeah, you can say we don't know how humans actually understand ideas. True, but not the point. However we understand ideas, LLMs don't do that.) And so they can only synthesize new ideas by rearranging words. This is much less than that human thinking. In particular, it seems that it could only generate ideas that are only new recombinations, not breakthrough ideas.
by smw | 2025-09-08 13:16:11+00:00
"When using Go for example, you don’t need any third-party libraries to make a web server, Go has it all there and you are done."

Fine, now what if you need to connect to a database, or parse a PDF, or talk to a grpc backend. What a hilariously short-sighted example.

To me, this whole article just screams inexperience.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-09-08 13:16:28+00:00
Really? Teams?? We went teams abd microsoft ecosystem fully because we needed extra windows management stuff as we have grown and users had software that required windows and excel and the biggest pain point has been teams. As near as i can tell it tries to do everythibg wrong and the things that are so blindingly obvious that it can't do them wrong, it finds a way to do them suboptimally
by vel0city | 2025-09-08 13:16:43+00:00
Acetaminophen related deaths are a few hundred a year in the US.

Opiate related deaths in the US have been around 50,000+/yr.

I don't personally know anyone who has died from acetaminophen usage or even particularly injured. I personally know several people who had their lives nearly destroyed by opiate abuse, and a few others who have died. And it's not like I'm hanging out with junkies all the time.
by walpurginacht | 2025-09-08 13:16:59+00:00
to be honest with the level of hype it's been sustaining, it's about damn time people get disappointed with unrealistic expectations they set (or let others set) for themselves. All the while people who merely view it as a fancy tool with all of its shortcomings, and treat it as such in building something with it, will keep finding benefits from it

With this, hopefully we can stop having peope using AI as a term exclusively for llms

We're about to, or have already hit the "data" wall recently as it gets increasingly hard to get more data to train on, exacerbated by more and more content being generated that risks autophagy

it's less and less about gathering more data now and either we're gonna try to engineer more data into existence, or it's back to the deep learning boom where it's more common to resort to optimizing architecture and training methodologies to squeeze out more performance from what data we have
by ashleyn | 2025-09-08 13:17:01+00:00
To have something that is genuinely private and would qualify for listing in the app store, options are pretty limited. I don't think they allow developers to use onion services or anything like that. You could host the server in other countries, but even in hostile countries, it's not a leap of logic to assume the NSA would have an easy time getting in there all without the worry of that pesky "legal" thing.
by woooooo | 2025-09-08 13:18:14+00:00
Because in the context of LLM transformers, you really just need matrix multiplication to be hyper-optimized, it's 90-99% (citation needed) of the FLOPs. Get some normalization and activation functions in and you're good to go. It's not a massive software ecosystem.

CUDA and CUBLAS being capable of a bunch of other things is really cool, and would take a long time to catch up with, but getting the bare minimum to run LLMs on any platform with a bunch of GDDR7 channels and cores at a reasonable price would have people writing torch/ggml backends within weeks.
Show HN: CityFlashback – Explore your city through historical photos
by iamsmaso | 2025-09-08 13:18:48+00:00
Hi HN

Over the last few weeks I started a small side project — partly to learn frontend development (I usually work as a backend developer in my 9-5), and partly because every time I walk around I keep wondering: “what did this place look like in the past?”

Until now I just searched for "<place> historic photos", but they rarely come with coordinates or a way to compare them with how the place looks today. So I built something like a “Wikipedia/GeoGuessr for historical images” — ideally community-maintained over time.

Right now, it’s very barebones: - an interactive map to browse the uploaded images - a simple side-by-side image comparator

It’s still an MVP with a small dataset (mainly Turin, Italy, since that’s where I live), but I plan to expand it as I have more time.

I’d love your feedback: - Does the concept sound interesting? - What features would make it more useful or fun? - Do you know of any open datasets of historical photos I could integrate?

Happy to answer any questions, and very open to suggestions
by whimsicalism | 2025-09-08 13:18:53+00:00
i think they likely are referring to the 2019-2020 trend of government leaning on social media companies to block/suppress certain content. not saying that is worse than what is happening now, but it definitely happened and i remember not being able to send links to news articles deemed politically problematic or “likely Russian disinformation”

e: cmon, downvoted just for providing the example all of these replies are asking for - really?
by alephnerd | 2025-09-08 13:18:58+00:00
KP Sharma Oli is pro-China which even Nepali media has pointed out [0]. And his formative years were spent growing up in a village (Garamani) barely 30 km outside Naxalbari during the Naxalbari Uprising, and attended secondary school barely 5 miles (Mechinagar) away from Naxalbari during the uprising.

In Nepali politics, Sher Bahadur Deuba is pro-India and Prachanda is pro-Prachanda (will back India some years, other years will back China).

The whole Indian internet conspiracy of "CIA ki saazish" is ridiculous when the US has barely 20 India scholars at all. There is 0 domain experience in India studies in the US, and that reflects in America's South Asia strategy (there is none).

[0] - https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/09/07/oli-s-diplomati...