MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ThomW | 2025-09-05 19:07:08+00:00
We did the same. Switching was a cinch honestly - the only thing that screwed me up was some dumb page that returned a bunch of nonsense I was supposed to do to my docker-compose.yml file to make it more compatible with podman-compose. I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why things weren't working, until I finally rolled back all the stupid suggested changes, and my app fired right up.

The only impactful difference I've noticed so far is that the company is moving to an artifact repository that requires authentication, and mounting secrets using --mount doesn't support the env= parameter -- that's really it.

I treat podman like I did docker all day long and it works great.
by scarface_74 | 2025-09-05 19:07:10+00:00
Again let’s look at YC’s latest batch of companies. How many of them are doing anything “innovative”?

An innovative product is one where customers in aggregate are willing to pay more for it than it costs to create and run. Any idiot can sell a bunch of dollar bills for 95 cents.

Going back to the latest batch of YC companies, there value play can easily be duplicated by any company in their vertical either by throwing a few engineers on it or creating a statement of work for the consulting company I work for and I can pull together a few engineers and knock it out in a few months and they will already have customers to sell it to.

There was one recent YC company (of course one of the BS AI companies) that was a hiring a “founding full stack engineer” for $150K. It looks like they were two non technical “serial entrepreneurs” without even an MVP that YC threw money at.

You can’t imagine how many times some hair brain underfunded startup reached out to me to be a “CTO” that paid less than I made as a mid level employee at BigTech with the promise of Monopoly money “equity”.
by tastyface | 2025-09-05 19:07:42+00:00
Just as a reminder, the person these CEOs are cheerfully meeting with is either a brutal pedophile, or at the very least, the documented best friend of one of the most prolific and notorious pedophiles in America -- someone the administration is trying to wipe from the news cycle through any means necessary, including pampering his co-conspirator/co-rapist and claiming the whole thing is some sort of Democratic hoax. Lies upon lies to conceal the rape of countless children in service of the glorious Party. But these tech magnates don’t give an iota of a shit as long as the money keeps flowing in.

This is some real end-of-a-republic degeneracy. Decades down the line, people will point to these events in history books to show that we weren’t remotely as civilized as we thought. In a just world everyone at this table would spend their retirement years in a cell.
by drivebycomm | 2025-09-05 19:07:47+00:00
Actually, even very basic code can cause it. The type system of Swift has issues.

https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/2016/07/12/type-checker-i...

let a: Double = -(1 + 2) + -(3 + 4) + -(5)

Still fails on a very recent version of Swift, Swift 6.1.2, if my test works.

Chris Lattner mentions something about him being more of an engineer than a mathematician, but a responsible and competent computer science engineer that is designing programming languages with complex type systems, absolutely has to at least be proficient in university-level mathematics and relevant theory, or delegate out and get computer scientists to find and triple-check any relevant aspects of the budding programing language.
by arp242 | 2025-09-05 19:07:56+00:00
I guess, but linux/arm64 specific bugs can and do happen. For my open source projects I offer builds for arm64 and others because, well, why not? I don't test it and I can't really test it (outside of qemu, I guess) and if it doesn't work then that's your problem to at least debug and probably fix too. But that attitude doesn't really work for a commercial game.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-05 19:08:21+00:00
One that gets me routinely is Android's two-stage quick control/notification drawer, which is further complicated by gesture-expandable notifications. It feels like a poorly thought out bodge to fit everything into a single screen. It’s annoying to me even as a software developer and must be terribly confusing to someone not well versed in the arcane incantations of mobile operating systems.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-09-05 19:08:56+00:00
every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.

BART really made a mess of transit to SFO, unfortunately. BART ridership never met projections so they played around quite a lot with service between Millbrae and SFO in effort to save money. For a while there was a Millbrae-SFO shuttle. For a while one line provided service during the day and one provided evening and weekend service. Even today only one of the two transbay lines that runs down the peninsula offers service to Millbrae and SFO.

Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-05 19:09:05+00:00
> Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light

This argument sounds intuitive, but are we really sure about that? People willingly seek out marketing materials to find things they want to buy. I've seen people flip through coupon books and catalogs as idle entertainment. That plus word of mouth may well be sufficient to keep knowledge of new products and such in circulation. Hell, it might even yield better-informed consumers, allowing the market to function more efficiently.
by johnfn | 2025-09-05 19:09:20+00:00
ChatGPT cites PubMed, CDC and the Lancet -- do those not meet the level of argument you'll respond to? I like reading as much as the next guy, but saying "Reading books is roughly the same level of benefit as exercise" without any citation - when there are clear citations in the opposite direction - doesn't contribute to a good discussion. State what you mean without hyperbole.
by grafmax | 2025-09-05 19:09:23+00:00
They’re backed by treasuries and subject to treasury market shocks (like the March 2020’s dash for cash). Large redemptions can see a feedback loop of redemption -> rushed selling -> treasury market stress -> redemption. Exactly the sort of scenario one might expect as the secular trend of the weakening dollar bubbles to the market’s surface.

Stablecoins hold a sizable portion of the treasury market - https://fintelegram.com/stablecoins-became-a-top-20-us-debt-...
by ttul | 2025-09-05 19:09:50+00:00
Back in 2001/2002, I was charged with building a WiFi hotspot box. I was a fan of OpenBSD and wanted to slim down our deployment, which was running on Python, to avoid having to copy a ton of unnecessary files to the destination systems. I also wanted to avoid dependency-hell. Naturally, I turned to `chroot` and the jails concept.

My deployment code worked by running the software outside of the jail environment and monitoring the running processes using `ptrace` to see what files it was trying to open. The `ptrace` output generated a list of dependencies, which could then be copied to create a deployment package.

This worked brilliantly and kept our deployments small and immutable and somewhat immune to attack -- not that being attacked was a huge concern in 2001 as it is today. When Docker came along, I couldn't help but recall that early work and wonder whether anyone has done a similar thing to monitor file usage within Docker containers and trim them down to size after observing actual use.
by homefree | 2025-09-05 19:10:08+00:00
I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.

The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.

I think most alternative options are better.

The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.
by nrjames | 2025-09-05 19:10:40+00:00
I'm in an enterprise environment where a central IT platform team controls what size warehouses we can have in Snowflake. They are not receptive to arguments for larger warehouses, unfortunately. Our issue becomes long-running queries b/c Snowflake spills the data to disk during the joins. TBH, I could join the data more quickly on my laptop than in the warehouse I'm allowed to use. Anyhow, I have then an old build server that is beefy & has 512 GB of RAM, so I can set up my aggregation and/or OLAP services there, since it's an unencumbered playground.
by salleisha | 2025-09-05 19:11:06+00:00
Founders spend so much energy on taxes and bookkeeping, this is usually time that should go into building product.

AI now touches every part of the startup journey: writing code, drafting pitches, designing slides. But can it actually handle something as painful (and costly) as taxes?

Would you trust an AI to keep your startup compliant?

Presenting AI-based Tax App for early-stage startups from 10$ a month.

taxhero.vc

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by nradov | 2025-09-05 19:12:07+00:00
BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.

The Boring Company has attempted to develop tunnel boring technology which theoretically could someday allow for cheaper expansion of all subway and light rail systems. Although in practice they haven't accomplished much and their existing projects aren't even used for rail transit.

https://www.boringcompany.com/

There are also several eVTOL startups aiming to improve quality of life through rapid point-to-point transportation. But I doubt they'll succeed on any widespread basis due to battery and noise limitations.
by hagbard_c | 2025-09-05 19:12:20+00:00
https://dailycaller.com/2025/09/05/trump-zuckerberg-bill-gat...

The view from 'the other side' (from most of the HN readership that is) where the invited CEOs are seen as Some Of The Right’s Biggest Villains - i.e. nobody likes them. For many conservatives, it’s hard to wrap your brain around the visual of billionaire Bill Gates being seated next to a smiling Melania Trump at the recent event, especially given Gates’ villain-like status among Trump’s most loyal base.
by rpearl | 2025-09-05 19:12:26+00:00
> Instead of worrying about how changes in one module might ripple through dozens of dependencies, you can focus on the explicit contracts between components

That's a great idea! I'd like to suggest that we make programming languages have this as a first class concept: as part of writing a module, you write down a static description of the explicit contract. You might even encode effects and error states into that description!

Then, you know that if you stick to that contract, nothing ripples through the dependencies, but if you change it, there's things you need to go update elsewhere.

You can even readily swap in different components that have that same external contract! And since it's static, we can check it before the program even runs.

"external contract" is kind of clunky. What if we called it a "type"?
by flerchin | 2025-09-05 19:12:35+00:00
In no way does BART pay for itself. 22% of their operating costs are covered by fares. Public transit is an amenity paid for by taxes. Private transport also has its own subsidy, but it's not even close.

https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/BART_FY24%2...
by jennyholzer | 2025-09-05 19:12:40+00:00
I remember a viral twitter photo of Sophie Turner smoking a Juul while filming the last episodes of Game of Thrones

Juul changed the cultural standing of vaping and (for a very brief moment of time) made it "cool" by means of social media celebrity promotion. They were hit with pretty aggressive punishment for this by the US FDA if I'm not mistaken.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-09-05 19:13:07+00:00
Your question is addressed in opening abstract: https://github.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/raw/refs/hea...

> Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting robots.txt exclusions and filtering for copyrighted, non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-05 19:13:21+00:00
It does, but mostly in an indirect way.

See, companies that deal with a lot of traffic on static data have geographically distributed caches.

Let's say Steam has a major game release, and gets slammed with the DL traffic of 5 million gamers all around the world trying to get their hands at that new game all at once. However, Steam has an instruction manual that allows any ISP to set up their own cache servers. So an ISP that has a cache set up can convert a lot of that global traffic to local traffic, saving them money, and offering users a better experience.

(One small ISP I knew had it set up so that all traffic to their local Steam cache was fully exempt from client rate limiting, reportedly because the ISP's admins were avid gamers.)

Other services like major CDNs, YouTube or Netflix may have deals with ISPs to locate their caching hardware on ISP premises, or may buy their own caching servers in specific datacenters. Same idea applies - it's cheaper for both ISPs and web services when the users hit local caches than when they "cache miss" and generate global traffic.

VPN use is a "forced cache miss", so it's a loss-loss for both ISPs and web services.
Show HN: PlugBrain block distracting apps with math challenges
by msbelaid | 2025-09-05 19:13:32+00:00
I've been working on PlugBrain, an open-source Android app that helps reduce screen time by blocking distracting apps. Instead of simply locking you out, PlugBrain makes you solve math puzzles to regain access. PlugBrain uses math challenges as a barrier. The difficulty increases as you use distracting apps more often, and decreases if you stay away. The app is GPL3-licensed and available on GitHub. Still early, so I'd love feedback on the code, usability, and whether the idea feels useful or annoying in practice.
by cco | 2025-09-05 19:13:49+00:00
Here's the deal, you don't need any of this.

I have Rayban Metas and the hardware is great...but the software borders on being unhelpful. If they merely served a dumb camera and bluetooth headset to my phone they'd be an unbelievably good product.

Meta won't do this because they want to capture _everything_ going on, but I don't want to chat with Meta's AI, it is very bad, I want to chat with Gemini or ChatGPT and I can do so with their glasses but I must initiate that on my phone (Meta won't give you wakewords for OpenAI/Google of course).

So my suggestion here would be don't? There is no need for an app store or anything like that, just the thinest software layer you need to make the sunglass hardware work as a dumb bluetooth headset and remote camera for the user's phone.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-09-05 19:13:57+00:00
From the Wikipedia

He is known for his virtual one-man war on moonshining, prostitution, gambling, and other vices along the Mississippi–Tennessee state line.

It is not schadenfreude, but something about when these morality crusaders get caught being the most vile of us all. Maybe it is just my cynicism.
by jhallenworld | 2025-09-05 19:14:09+00:00
So here's the thing that's coming for EVs, and I finally started to see it for the Leaf: driveway DIY battery replacement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQ-RROpls0

Yes, this involves lying on your back with a 700 lb battery held up by jacks just inches above your head. But heck, services are expensive these days so it's going to happen.
by Bender | 2025-09-05 19:14:19+00:00
Farming productivity levels would go back to around 1800 or so, and we could barely feed a billion people at that time.

Agreed. That's why each community would have to do homesteading and regenerative farming on much smaller and more distributed scales like we used to. All centralized mono-crap farming would be gone and cities would have to break up and move into rural communities. People would need to have more kids to do work around the homestead. People here would know this concept as "horizontal scaling".
by j45 | 2025-09-05 19:14:22+00:00
The loaded cost is truly something else, and most understood by people who had to find a way to pay for it all, or paid for it all for others.

The majority of businesses in the world, (and the majority of jobs) are created and delivered by small business, not big.

And then the issues when a service goes down it takes everyone else down with it.
by m0llusk | 2025-09-05 19:14:27+00:00
Many here are restricting the domain to engineering which makes the real bottlenecks disappear. A good reminder of the larger context is Ralph Grabowski's Marketing to Engineering ratio. Companies that spend less on marketing that engineering tend not to endure. Companies that do endure tend to spend over double and closer to ten times as much on marketing as engineering. So the real bottlenecks in development are not centered on engineering, but the coordination of engineering and marketing in order to solve problems that matter to customers in ways that customers can be aware of and assign value to.

Go ahead and code as much as you want. Unless you can communicate the utility of that code to a paying customer it has no value or relevance.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-05 19:14:41+00:00
Zen scratches most of my Arc itches, really, so take a look at its feature set. If AI agents must be a part of the product, it should be possible to turn them off entirely, not leaving the slightest trace anywhere in the UI. The only place I personally want AI in my browser might be for searching history and bookmarks, but a lightweight local model would be perfectly fine for that use case; no need to rope in third parties.
by asdff | 2025-09-05 19:14:47+00:00
And this is with marginal EV adoption. Imagine if it was full scale the headaches that would come. I mean think of the current amount of gas stations around, that would be insufficient to cover EV demand due to the fact EVs need to linger for so much longer. So good bye to whatever in your town needs to be destroyed in order to park more cars and charge them. So much for walkable cities.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-05 19:14:47+00:00
> pain/annoyance

Can be mitigated via drugs and increasing thresholds with, as you did, training, which results in decreased stress hormone levels from lower forms of physiological and psychological stress, better lactate metabolisms (not sure it's an actual metabolism, but better fitness results in higher storage capacities for lactate and quicker recovery), etc.

And endurance literally means your body and brain can suffer/sustain higher levels of stress due to fatigue and damage because the mechanisms causing "overflow" and "breakdown", "total collapse", even if it's just for the sake of reducing subsequent damage, are balanced by their biochemical counterparts and, again, higher storage capacities for pretty much everything body and brain produce while generating, transforming, exerting energy and all the exhaust ...
by simonw | 2025-09-05 19:15:08+00:00
Everything I've seen makes me suspect that models have continually got more efficient to serve.

The strongest evidence is that the models I can run on my own laptop got massively better over the last three years, despite me keeping the same M2 64GB machine without upgrading it.

Compare original LLaMA from 2023 to gpt-oss-20b from this year - same hardware, huge difference.

The next clue is the continuing drop in API prices - at least prior to the reasoning rush of the last few months.

One more clue: o3. OpenAI's o3 had a 80% price drop a few months ago which I believe was due to them finding further efficiencies in serving that model at the same quality.

My hunch is that there are still efficiencies to be wrung out here. I think we'll be able to tell if that's not holding if API prices stop falling over time.
Turn pose photos into editable animation code
by Amyang | 2025-09-05 19:15:52+00:00
Built a web editor that converts any pose photo into semantic animation code using computer vision. Demo: https://popo.love/playground, https://mmd-mpl.vercel.app/

How it works:

Upload pose photo → MediaPipe extracts landmarks My solver generates readable MPL code like leg_l bend forward 120; arm_r bend forward 45; Edit the code, export to animation formats

Tech stack: Rust compiler (WASM), MediaPipe, Babylon.js 3D preview. Runs entirely in browser.

The language (MPL) bridges human-readable syntax with quaternion math. I've used it to fine-tune LLMs for text-to-animation generation.

Use cases: Game dev prototyping, VTuber expressions, animation learning, AI motion research.

GitHub: https://github.com/AmyangXYZ/MMD-MPL
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-05 19:15:59+00:00
What is in theory possible in a language/runtime is often less important than historically contingent factors like which languages it’s easy to hire developers for that can achieve certain performance envelopes and which ecosystems have good tooling for micro-optimization.

In JS for example, if you can write your code as a tight loop operating on ArrayBuffer views you can achieve near C performance. But that’s only if you know what optimizations JS engines are good at and have a mental model how processors respond to memory access patterns, which very few JS developers will have. It’s still valid to note that idiomatic JS code for an arbitrary CPU-bound task is usually at least tens of times slower than idiomatic C.
by m463 | 2025-09-05 19:16:20+00:00
that's not cheap. Cheap is the older leafs, which go for $3k.

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/cta?auto_make_model=niss...

I bought a 2012 for $7500 in 2016 and drove it for several years.

1. chargers suck. there was evgo, blink, chargepoint. Most locations had 1 or most 2 DC fast chargers, but frequently they didn't work or were busy. Not reliable.

2. range was less that expected, even if you update expectations. It takes engineering to use the range you have, especially taking #1 into account. You don't want to get to a fast charger at 1% then find it doesn't work.

3. the battery health wasn't great, but because the battery capacity/range was less, the number of battery cycles was significantly more. I charged to a higher %, discharged low each day, and cycled daily.

4. the leaf was a perfect "around town" car. Not for trips.

Tesla has basically solved all of this and their cars are usable like a regular car*

* don't be pedantic, in 99% of situations/locations
by nativeit | 2025-09-05 19:16:23+00:00
I do think Wikipedia is something of a marvel of an online community. It's certainly got plenty of warts, but it's managed to remain broadly effective and focused on its mission. It's one of the last remaining vestiges of the open and free worldwide web that I grew up with in the 1990s, and that shaped my life as a tech professional. I will always appreciate its philosophy for free information and transparency, and I think there is a lot to learn from its ongoing success.