MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rswail | 2025-09-02 06:32:16+00:00
There was a metal tooth that the shift lock engaged on the shift key below it, effectively "locking" the key carriage in place in the "shifted" position (caps lock for alphabetic characters, the "special" characters for the numerics).

To release it, you either pressed the shift key down, or pressed the shift lock again to "unlock" the shift.

No animals were harmed by the implementation of the tooth :)
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-02 06:32:20+00:00
That definition, and Richard Stallman himself, completely agree with me. A BSD license also guarantees "that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software".

Here is Stallman spelling it out explicitly:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html

> The two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL insist that modified versions of the program must be free software as well. Non-copyleft licenses do not insist on this. We recommend copyleft, because it protects freedom for all users, but non-copylefted software can still be free software, and useful to the free software community.

> There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license, X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses.

So, I stand by my assertion. You are completely wrong in saying that only copy left licenses are free/libre software, even according to Richard Stallman himself.
by jeswin | 2025-09-02 06:33:34+00:00
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by GistNoesis | 2025-09-02 06:33:45+00:00
My conviction is based on the interesting phenomenon of game tree collapsing.

When you get better at the game, the number of "candidate" moves you need to explore goes down. For example when you are naive at chess you need to explore all legal moves, and then all legal moves response to these moves. The number of nodes in this tree grows exponentially, and the tree depth is rather limited to a small depth.

But when your list of "candidate" move is reduced to size 1. The number of nodes in the tree is equal to its depth. You can "unroll the line very cheaply". (That's the concept of lines in chess. In go that's the concept of "ladders").

When your candidate list is of size 2, the game tree is of size 2^(depth+1).

You can have fractional candidate list size, by only needing to explore down the tree some times, or having the need to explore only 2 candidate some times.

The complexity grows as (Fractional Candidate List Size) ^ (depth + 1 ). With FCLS being between 1 and 2. There is a transition phase which occurs, and allows to go much deeper in the game tree which simplify things and make things tractable (because you then reach endgame tables or an equivalence class number (aka you don't necessarily know the result yet you just know it will be the same result as all these other types of games) ).

So your function is allowed to have a smaller inner function called recursively to explore the game tree of candidate moves within a computational budget, to help make a decision. The upper function resolve the equivalence number to their "win" "draw" "lose" value always in the same way and takes the appropriate maximum (remember your network only goal is to be always consistent).

The better your network get at managing his computational budget the deeper it can go. You can think of it as a version of alpha-beta pruning with improving heuristics.
Show HN: A minimal disk price comparison site for Amazon drives
by zh7788 | 2025-09-02 06:34:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a very minimal website that tracks disk prices from Amazon and presents them in a clean, sortable table: https://diskprices-frontend.vercel.app/ .

Motivation: I often needed to quickly check the cost per TB/GB across different storage types (HDDs, SSDs, flash cards, tapes, etc.) and found most existing tools too cluttered or outdated. So I decided to build a lightweight frontend that fetches the data and makes it easy to compare.

Features:

Sort by price per TB or per GB.

Filter by capacity, brand, media type, or condition.

Focused only on Amazon data for now (to keep it simple).

Mobile-friendly, minimal UI.

It’s still an early project — feedback on usability, performance, or what additional features might be useful (e.g., alerts, more sources, historical charts) would be greatly appreciated.

Repo (if you want to take a look / contribute): [your GitHub link if available]

Thanks for checking it out!
by mvdwoord | 2025-09-02 06:34:56+00:00
Tweet content:

"You may have seen recent compaints about Meta's webcrawler (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45092604) and the fact that people are already leaving the SuperIntelligence Team (https://businessinsider.com/meta-superintelligence-team-rese...).

My internal sources report that these incidents are not just correlated but most definitely causated. One of the standard design questions at Meta is to design a web crawler (https://finalroundai.com/interview-questions/stealthy-web-cr...). However since MSL members were handpicked by Zuck they did not have to go through the regular interview loop.

Unfortunately, as soon as these elite recruits started to check in code to mine the web to patch up Llama 4, shit hit the fan, and it became clear that they all had great hair, but severly lacked in coding skills. Nobody gives a shit about the fact that dowloading the same tarball a million times might bankrupt amateur language designers, the real pain is that Meta's disks are filling up so quick that the next generation of datacenters would have to be at least 8 million square feet instead of the already gigantic Hyperion data center currently under construction (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-...).

Things apparently got so bad that Meta's Infra VP Santosh Janardhan threatened to leave and join either Bill Jia at Google or Jay Parikh at Microsoft if the worst MSL offenders were not let go.

With with Joel Pobar and Aparna Ramani now firmly embedded in MSL, the old boys’ network at Meta proved unshakable, and Mark knew better than to gamble, and ultimately backed Santosh’s side."
by mrandish | 2025-09-02 06:36:11+00:00
> I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.

I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame.

And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.
by bingbing123 | 2025-09-02 06:36:30+00:00
I hacked together a small project that mixes Sticker AI with nanobanana (a fast and cheap image generation model). The goal was to make it easy for anyone to generate their own sticker packs without paying a lot or waiting forever.

Right now you can: • Generate stickers in multiple styles + expressions • Export them for use in messaging apps • Run everything at low cost thanks to nanobanana

It’s still an early version, but it works — I’d love feedback on what features you think would make this genuinely useful for creators.
by dustincoates | 2025-09-02 06:36:46+00:00
I've had even worse. We wanted to buy a product and couldn't do so on our own, so I left my contact information on their "speak to a sales person" form.

No response for a week. So I emailed an email address that was included in the onboarding email.

No response for another week. So I sent their CEO a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I really want to buy, let's talk.

No response for another week (and four months later). So I gave up.
by rswail | 2025-09-02 06:38:00+00:00
Line printers (also "chain printers" from IBM) used "form feed" to move the paper to the next "form", which for the most part was moving the tractor fed paper to the line after the page perforations.

The printers either kept track of the number of lines printed "so far", or, in the case of a chain printer, there was a literal chain (similar to an engine timing belt) that had a particular location that was supposed to be aligned with the paper perforation.

Standard tractor feed paper had a printable area that was 132 monospaced characters wide (13.2") and 11" high. Tractor feed paper had the holes at a standard distance apart vertically and a standard margin to allow for the tractor holes and an area before printing, so that the paper could also have vertical perforations to remove the tractor feed paper after printing.

Teletypes were 72 characters wide and 0.1" line height and used continuous paper rolls.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-09-02 06:38:51+00:00
I did something similar about 20 years ago, although not using JWT.

The application supplied a session token when first querying the database. The database would make a call to the authentication server to verify it and obtain the roles associated with that session. If it had not seen that combination of roles before, it would build and cache access tables for them (needed for performance when using views for row level security). Then any further queries using that token were fast. This also worked with connection pooling.

It had some rough edges; we had to run periodic cleanup jobs to remove stale cached access tables and tokens. And even with them, enforcing row level security consumed about 30% of the database server performance!

But, it did work and remained in service for about 7 years. Eventually, they replaced it with something much simpler. I had left and nobody understood it anymore. Which I guess is a separate issue about doing unusual things with tech...
by numpad0 | 2025-09-02 06:39:50+00:00
Lots of SoCs are "open" in the sense that complete documentation including programming manuals are available. With couple man-centuries of developer time each, you could port Linux over those SoCs. but that doesn't count as being "open". On the other hand, there are a lot of straight up proprietary hardware that are considered "open", like Raspberry Pi.

Which means, "open" has nothing to do with openness. What you want is standardization and commoditization.

There are practically no x86 hardware that require model-specific custom images to boot. There are practically no non-x86 hardware that don't require model-specific custom images to boot. ARM made perceptible amount of efforts in that segment with Arm SystemReady Compliance Program, which absolutely nobody in any serious businesses cares about, and it only concern ARM machines even if it worked.

IMO, one of problems in efforts going in from software side is over-bloated nature of desktop software stacks and bad experiences widely had with UEFI. They aren't going to upgrade RAM to adopt overbloated software that are bigger than the application itself just because that is the new standard.
by jjav | 2025-09-02 06:39:59+00:00
> if some city politicians can just vote for higher and higher taxes continuously

The linked article ignores an important point that many LVT proponents tend to ignore. How, and who, sets the value of your land?

Current property taxes, any flaws aside, are fairly transparent and difficult to game. A property value is set based on comparable sales in the neighborhood. If the government decides to assess your 1500sqft house at $1M but every neighboring 1500sqft home has sold for 500K in the last year, you can very successfully appeal this wrong assessment. It has to be based on actual comparable sales, and that is difficult to cheat on because it is driven by the clearing price on the market on executed sales.

A LVT is based on the theoretical value of your lot, on what it could be worth if some optimal but nonexistent building was there generating maximum revenue. But it is all speculation. This is very open to fraud and corruption.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-02 06:40:00+00:00
> This is not related to the story as such, but I live in Aarhus and this is the first I hear about it. I read three national news outlets and one specific to my local region of Østjylland a couple of times a day. I wonder if I should swap some of them.

Something that's stuck with me is the time I walked into my local bookstore and found banners advertising that a new book by Orson Scott Card was already out and available for sale then and there.

Pretty much any other type of product (that I might buy) would have managed to publicize this to me well in advance of the day you could purchase the product.

To your question, I think the types of content delivered by the publishers you read are unlikely to change, and if you want to start hearing about new types of things, you'll need to find sources that cover them.
by sirodoht | 2025-09-02 06:40:09+00:00
Maybe unfairly but quite disappointed at this development.

This sentence crystalises open source:

> "Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service."

You make something for everyone. And they may use it as they please. This is what open means. Did the author make something open source with the hope that nobody would actually use the gift that they made?

Mataroa [1] also started with MIT license (directly inspired by bear blog) and it subsequently changed as well but to Affero GPL instead.

[1] https://github.com/mataroablog/mataroa
by green7ea | 2025-09-02 06:42:29+00:00
Both are possible.

You can have alternative app stores on Android without any restrictions — the most famous example would be F-Droid which hosts free software. Nothing stops Epic, Meta or any company from also having such a store.

When you ship a certified Android, it has to come pre-installed with the Google Play Store but some vendors like Amazon and Huawei ship an alternative OS with their own stores to replace the Google one. It's not officially Android but can be based on the Android Open Source Project.

Very few companies have chosen to do either and it was usually because they were forced to (Huawei).
by rswail | 2025-09-02 06:42:47+00:00
AWS has always ridden other products (Postgres, MS-SQL, Redis, etc) that are open source or has negotiated licenses (Windows, MS-SQL, Oracle RDBMS) that are bundled in the end-user price per hour/GB/whatever.

AWS has Bedrock to use various AI providers and has bundled the licensing into the price, so they are getting the users without having to develop the actual AI.

They provide the compute, networking etc, and they provide the users to the AI vendors.

Why would they need to develop their own?
by ivape | 2025-09-02 06:45:14+00:00
You think Chinese companies are short on data and people? Google doesn’t have an advantage there until the CCP takes on a more hands on approach.

Tin foil hat time:

- If you were a God and you wanted to create an ideal situation for the arrival of AI

- It would make sense to precede it with a social media phenomena that introduces mass scale normalization of sharing of personal information

Yes, that would be ideal …

People can’t stop sharing and creating data on anything, for awhile now. It’s a perfect situation for AI as an independent, uncontrollable force.
by high_na_euv | 2025-09-02 06:46:37+00:00
>Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.

How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-02 06:47:38+00:00
> "Rungholt" probably means "wrong/low wood".

This is an interesting point. Names are often older than they appear.

I have a book on Greek mythology that takes the position that Hercules, including his name, is considerably older than most of the Greek pantheon and should be thought of as a foreign import. But the form of his name ("Heracles") looks so natural in Ancient Greek, "glory of Hera" in the same way that you see other Greeks named Agathocles or Themistocles, that the mythology around the relationship between Hera and Heracles, which is extensive, must have developed from that apparent similarity.

Potentialities like this keep us on our toes when we look at names like "Rungholt".
by mcny | 2025-09-02 06:48:04+00:00
We probably can't even name all their products. I doubt even anyone at these companies, even the CEOs can name all their products.

One conspiracy theory I've heard is that because they were making so much money, they hired or at least recruited enough people so they would not have any serious competition.

Also, a lot of things that look straightforward is probably a lot of work internally. For example, renaming Facebook to meta was likely not a simple one point story, right?

Also, I bring this up every chance I get because it bothers me so much but making a worse product probably takes more effort in terms of man hours than making a good one. Look at this... .https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_...
by george87 | 2025-09-02 06:48:14+00:00
Location: Europe Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Java (Spring, Swing, FX), JavaScript (Node, React, D3), Python, various SQL & NoSQL data stores, ETL platforms, UI/UX design tools, AI/LLM tools, Git, AWS, etc. Résumé/CV: www.linkedin.com/in/georgetanev/ Email: geotanjazz@gmail.com

Multifaceted software engineer with a master's degree in computer science and research published with IEEE, OEIS, and Springer. 15+ years of experience helping companies and other organizations grow, by developing comprehensive software solutions from design to deployment, from web and desktop applications to data pipelines and interactive visualizations. Primarily interested in software engineer/consultant and tech co-founder/CTO roles.
by gdotdesign | 2025-09-02 06:48:39+00:00
In the last 8 years, we had two kids and I have a full-time job, so Mint was/is a side project with virtually no marketing.

Yes, it is a bit of torture :) however I'm getting there. Context (https://mint-lang.com/news/context) was the last bigger feature before 1.0 which I'm planning to release this year.
by motorest | 2025-09-02 06:49:13+00:00
> This is not really true. Google has all the compute but in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class (catching up, but it has not been a given).

I don't know what you are talking about. I use Gemini on a daily basis and I honestly can't tell a difference.

We are at a point where training corpus and hallucinations makes more of a difference than "model class".
by high_na_euv | 2025-09-02 06:49:51+00:00
>Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.

You mean small startups founded by experienced engineers?
by h4ch1 | 2025-09-02 06:49:55+00:00
Honestly, from a person who has been part of both React and Svelte, this feels like the (for the lack of a better word) bastard child of both. It looks like a very opinionated, mish-mash of Svelte and React.

Kudos to the dev for working towards realizing their ideas, but Svelte and Solid have essentially solved front-end frameworks for the better part. People still hung up on React happily use Next in prod, people who want simple SSG go towards Astro or Hugo, people who use Svelte/Solid will not switch because this simply doesn't seem to improve upon anything that either do, so I really don't see what this solves in the slightest.

I very happily use Svelte for work, for my personal projects because of fine grained reactivity through signals, no bs syntax that feels like writing "just" HTML & Typescript, mature tooling and great performance. I have no interest switching to something that makes me feel like I'm stuck in the middle of a better React and a worse Svelte.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-02 06:50:03+00:00
> He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time.

Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too.

> Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees...

That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?
by swiftcoder | 2025-09-02 06:50:14+00:00
Having been upstream of this problem (I was engineer at Amazon for ~5 years), they will typically not do any of those things.

The amount of paperwork they have to jump through just to send you a patch makes it not worthwhile. They might fork in extremis, but to do that they first have to justify to management that it's worth ongoing effort to support. Hiring a maintainer really only happens for truly foundational projects like the Xen hypervisor.

What they will do is use the public nature of the CVE process to pressure you to patch with the SLA - and that's generally pretty effective. Only a few open source groups (for example, the npm team) have enough public clout to reject CVEs without reputation damage.
by mgsloan2 | 2025-09-02 06:50:39+00:00
Very fun to peruse! Curious why the olivetti typewriter has such strangely shaped key caps.

While it seems like OLPC didn't really achieve the full vision of the project, I have some anecdata of success - my coworker got an OLPC when young (otherwise without access to computers), learned to code on it, and is now an awesome programmer.
by bigiain | 2025-09-02 06:50:42+00:00
Bunny Huang has been doing a lot of work on this:

Open hardware you can buy now: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

The open OS that runs on it: https://betrusted.io/xous-book/

A secret/credential manager built on top of the open hardware and open software: https://betrusted.io

His blog section about it: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/category/betrusted/precur...

"The principle of evidence-based trust was at work in our decision to implement Precursor’s brain as an SoC on an FPGA, which means you can compile your CPU from design source and verify for yourself that Precursor contains no hidden instructions or other backdoors. Accomplishing the equivalent level of inspection on a piece of hardwired silicon would be…a rather expensive proposition. Precursor’s mainboard was designed for easy inspection as well, and even its LCD and keyboard were chosen specifically because they facilitate verification of proper construction with minimal equipment."