MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Yizahi | 2025-09-03 10:57:29+00:00
Google Pixel line is nice in theory over past several generations, but unfortunately in some regions of the world their pricing makes no sense. For example one of the EU countries:

Google Pixel 10 Pro XL 256Gb - 1560 USD (converted to USD for easier comparison)

Samsung S25 Plus 256Gb - 1095 USD (lowest price in reputable shop, there are even lower listing at grey market ones)

Samsung S25 Ultra 256Gb - 1370 USD

Apple 16 Pro Max 256Gb - 1500 USD

Oneplus 13 256Gb - 1015 USD

Prices shown are lowest ones in the big retail shops only, for better comparison.

In no universe Pixel would win against those. Apple is more advanced and more perceived "prestige". Samsung is a staple top of the line and respectable in reputation, definitely on par with features. Chinese phones are not far off in features too (and in some areas are ages ahead, BBK's corporation 100W fast charging beats all western competitions fair and square).
by shufflerofrocks | 2025-09-03 10:57:50+00:00
Then you should take a better look. Each local ISP has their own self-designated territory or "area". They don't let any other ISPs establish themselves in their areas, beating them up or cutting their wires if they try - you can talk to any ISP technician and they'll tell you about it. 90% of the fluctuations in network are from a cable cut, often by competing agencies.

It's also one of the big reasons why AirFibre is becoming more prominent - can't cut cables if there are no cables.

The above commentor uses "mafia" not in the literal sense but he's talking about the mafia-like system where each ISP has territories they fight over.

Tbh, it's manageable in Bangalore, since the territories are already established and there's not much interference but much more horrible in other areas - we had to suffer with a shitty ISP in my hometown for years bc they kept cutting cables & bullying any other ISP that tried to come in.
by Ruphin | 2025-09-03 10:58:13+00:00
I guess for most people the standard is to install things from NPM which explains the format of the documentation. If you want to do something completely raw, you can replace 'lit' with something like this:

https://unpkg.com/lit@3.3.1/index.js?module

You can even dynamically import that in the a running browser console and use it directly on any webpage.
by chownie | 2025-09-03 10:58:25+00:00
> C genuinely is easy to pick up.

I feel like this is a bit of an https://xkcd.com/2501/ situation.

C is considered easy to pick up for the average user posting HN comments because we have the benefit of years -- the average comp sci student, who has been exposed to Javascript and Python, who might not know what "pass by reference" even means... I'm not sure they're going to be considering C easy.
by pastage | 2025-09-03 10:58:54+00:00
All those subjects in the right context are things the left wing fights for. Reducing a complex subject and then saying because you do not agree with my interpretation you are against children, is not optimal. E.g. Climate Activists are a pretty diverse group you will find lots of people who have said the same thing. It is obvious this is a PR/Research stunt, but it might still pay off. This is not a straight forward discussion where all people in the right or left groups has to agree.
by csomar | 2025-09-03 10:59:25+00:00
The battery (am assuming it's just sand and metal) should be very cheap compared to Lithium especially in the places where you generated solar energy (they are hot and have a lot of sand).

The problem is: is it profitable to even store energy there? There is no mention beyond "In operation, the sand battery has demonstrated a round trip efficiency of 90 percent.". That doesn't mean much if you do not compare it to Lithium and you don't give me a breakdown of the costs.

The other thing: Size. Is that big thing enough to store energy for a city? a neighborhood? A building? A house?

If it's enough just for a house, then I have trouble seeing this scale.
by SebastianKra | 2025-09-03 10:59:46+00:00
I thankfully migrated or left all Aurelia projects, but every time someone mentions it, I remember new horror stories.

Its .html temples were shipped unmodified directly to the client (yes, including comments). Except they weren't actually html, and sometimes the browser would try to clean them up, breaking the template.

Reactivity was achieved through all kinds of weird mechanisms (eg monkey-patching arrays to watch for mutations). It would frequently resort to polling on every tick or break completely.

DI used TypeScripts experimental decorators, even long after it was clear that it would never become stable.

On the other hand, templates weren't type checked.
Show HN: Fst – Lightweight C utility for detailed directory statistics LGPL 3.0
by Forgret | 2025-09-03 11:00:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve just released fst, a minimalistic C utility that provides comprehensive statistics about directories. It’s designed to be fast, with no dependencies, and is fully statically compilable.

Features:

Counts of files, directories, empty files/folders

Classifies binary, text, and script files

Displays min, max, and average file sizes

Identifies recent and oldest files

Lists executable files, symbolic and hard links

Supports human-readable sizes and recursive stats

Key Points:

Written in pure C, minimal dependencies, lightning fast

Works on both ARM and x86 architectures, fully statically compilable

Can run with no arguments (defaults to the current directory)

Licensed under LGPL 3.0

GitHub repository: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/fst-ferki

Submitted to GNU for review

I'm seeking feedback, ideas, and contributions from the community. The goal is to enhance usability, add more metrics, and possibly extend internationalization support in the future.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be highly appreciated!
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 11:00:18+00:00
The entire copyright and patent system is built on the principle of forcing the release of IP; it is time delayed in exchange for the legal protections you gain if you opt in to the system. That is the encouragement!

Extending this to enable software access by 3rd parties doesn't feel controversial to me. The core intent of copyright and patent seems to be "when the time limit expires, everyone should be able to use the IP". But in practice you often can't, where hardware with software is concerned.
by krapp | 2025-09-03 11:00:28+00:00
In this context, "European" means "white." Jesus probably did not look like the bearded white hippie commonly depicted in Western (primarily American and British) iconography.

Spaniards, Egyptians, Greeks and Levantines may or may not look similar (seems a bit broad, like the geographical definition of "European") but they also don't often look like "white people." Especially not in Egypt or the Levant.
by jmull | 2025-09-03 11:01:02+00:00
I think the ambition is much larger than what could be accomplished by part-time volunteer work. It was either this or somehow get a bigcorp to dedicate 2, 5, 10 full time salaries to it.

Honestly it's not clear to me that the money they have in income now is enough to accomplish the ambition, but I guess that's why it is a fundraiser in addition to a financial report.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-03 11:02:53+00:00
> but waste in a ecosystem of vast abundance seems like a feature, not a bug.

The problem is that it's not a ecosystem of vast abundance, just occasional abundance. Literally no-one in the world right now is sitting on a constant supply of TWs of excess electrical power and saying "golly gee what are we going to do with all this". Perhaps France got closest in history and their prices still aren't "too cheap to meter".

You can "waste" the power (either by actually "burning" it to heat and dumping it, or just disconnecting the solar panels), but then you'll be short of power later and need to fall back on something expensive or with high externalities. It's also bad in terms of the capex for the solar panels (assuming solar), as you can't use your expensive plant as much as you want. If you can you'd rather use "$10" of energy that you can't sell to store and sell it later, even as heat, at any price than just lose it all.

Even if you massively, massively overbuilt solar and wind so that you were in a "vast abundance" scenario on average, you still have to store some of it for night and/or winter.
by shakna | 2025-09-03 11:04:17+00:00
That would violate the license.

> However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.

and

> Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License.

"Convey" is the key word there. You _must_ convey the license. Stripping it out, is not conveying it. Why is it automatic? Because under the AGPL, the license is a part of the work itself. You cannot remove it or modify it, without breaking the license, and thus having no right to modify it in the first place.
by M95D | 2025-09-03 11:04:20+00:00
>> Why don't you send WOL directly over the internet? (You'll need to set up a permanent ARP record on the router.)

> Hm, so never tried something like that before actually, I think for OpenWrt I need to install arp packages.

No, you don't. Put this in /etc/firewall.user or /etc/rc.local (you can do it from UI) and forward a UDP port to 192.168.0.254 or whaterver subnet you're using:

ip neigh add 192.168.0.254 lladdr ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff nud permanent dev br-lan extern_learn

The incoming packet will be broadcasted (ff:ff...) on the br-lan interface. 192.168.0.254 doesn't need to exist - the sleeping computer doesn't care.
by jlokier | 2025-09-03 11:04:37+00:00
In my experience, in the UK, the rental agency required 12 months rent in advance (plus another 2 months rent as deposit) when I was self-employed. They would have accepted monthly rent if I had 5x the annual rent in cash savings, but I didn't.

And then every year after that they required another 12 months rent up front, when it came to the annual tenancy renewal. Track record of paying the rent wasn't good enough to prove that I could keep paying the rent.
by baptistegr1 | 2025-09-03 11:05:16+00:00
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by adrian_b | 2025-09-03 11:06:42+00:00
Not even the deterministic high-level programming languages have succeeded to make the assembly languages irrelevant, despite everybody claiming that this will happen.

While the amount of source code written in assembly languages is an extremely small fraction of the total existing code and only few programmers are competent to write such programs, that assembly source code determines a large fraction of the performance of the applications run on modern computers.

LLMs are likely to behave similarly, i.e. a good amount of programs will continue to be written directly in deterministic programming languages by competent programmers, while a greater amount of source code, usable for solving problems that are neither novel nor critical, will be generated by people with lower skills, with the help of LLMs.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-09-03 11:07:16+00:00
What's your opinion on modeling the world? Some people think the world is 3D, so we need to model the 3D world. Some people think that since human perception is 2D, we can just model the 2D view rather than the underlying 3D world, since we don't have enough 3D data to capture the world but we have many 2D views.

Fixed question: Thanks a lot for the feedback that human perception is not 2D. Let me rephrase the question: since all the visual data we see on computers can be represented as 2D images (indexed by time, angle, etc.), and we have many such 2D datasets, do we still need to explicitly model the underlying 3D world?
by benreesman | 2025-09-03 11:08:29+00:00
I'm not saying that the decline of Enlightenment values and the rise of crony-nepo-central-committee surveilance nightmare is "other", I'm saying it is indifferent to the stated political system, it's about the de facto political system no matter what you call it.

What I care about is outcomes, what actually happens, what norms and institutional posture actually obtains in reality.

And on that basis, "western liberal" society has very little business holding its nose up about "authoritarianism" as a blanket term for rival nations in 2025. No one here is talking about Sudan or Turministan, they're talking about other advanced nations with participatory politics, robust social welfare programs, limited influence for oligarchs, and highly competent governance.
by gitaarik | 2025-09-03 11:08:32+00:00
I made a state management lib for Lit, that's just as lightweight (258 lines) and intuitive:

https://github.com/gitaarik/lit-state

I've used it extensively myself, for creating complex web apps with many (nested) components interacting with each other.

I don't understand why Lit hasn't gained more popularity, because for me it is basically React, but then more browser-native, much less boiler plate, and much faster rendering. There are some things you have to get used to, but when you do it doesn't limit you in any way.
by twoodfin | 2025-09-03 11:08:38+00:00
Low-latency databases are architected to be memory-bandwidth bound. SMT allows more connections to be generating more loads faster, utilizing more memory bandwidth.

Think async or green threads, but for memory or branch misses rather than blocking I/O.

(As mentioned elsewhere, optimizing for vendor licensing practices is a nice side benefit, but obviously if the vendors want $X for Y compute on their database, they’ll charge that somehow.)
by Chris2048 | 2025-09-03 11:09:30+00:00
Here's a cheat: use sieves to get the right grind size; then how "good" the grinder is is a matter of only efficiency - the worse the grind the less % is usable and the more coffee wasted. Then you can calculate the best option based on deltas of wasted coffee * coffee cost vs the cost of a better grinder (and maybe expected lifetime, but I assume burrs will wear get worse over time?).
by Neil44 | 2025-09-03 11:11:15+00:00
If both SMT cores are being asked to do the same workload they will likely contend for the same resource and execution units internally so the boost from SMT will be less. If they have different workloads the boost will be more. Now throw in P and E cores on newer CPU's, turbo and non-turbo, everything gets very complicated. I did see a study that adding SMT got a much better performance per watt boost than adding turbo which was interesting/useful.
by kragen | 2025-09-03 11:11:15+00:00
To clarify, the current flow never goes to ground; it goes back to where it started, which is why we call it a "circuit". When you do it without routing it through a load like a bank of resistors, it's called a "short circuit". Electromechanical generators will generally tend to catch on fire if you short-circuit them.

Solar panels have no problem with being short circuited; the amount of heat they produce in that state is the same as any other black object in sunlight.

Windmills are like any other electromechanical generator in this sense. You have to stop them with a brake. But that is totally a thing you can do, and quickly, and every mainstream windmill does it regularly (if only to handle overspeed winds safely), although, when this system fails, you get spectacular viral video content.

In the usual case where it works, though, you don't need a load bank either.

Load banks come into play when conventional inflexible baseload generators can't ramp down fast enough or when perverse market incentives pay renewables operators to pump power into the grid when it's not being demanded.
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 11:11:39+00:00
I've taught several different languages to both 1st year uni students, and new joiners to a technical company, where they had no programming background.

Honestly, C seems to be one of the easier languages to teach the basics of. It's certainly easier than Java or C++, which have many more concepts.

C has some concepts that confuse the hell out of beginners, and it will let you shoot yourself in the foot very thoroughly with them (much more than say, Java). But you don't tend to encounter them till later on.

I have never said getting good at C is easy. Just that it's easy to pick up.
by delhanty | 2025-09-03 11:12:59+00:00
Congratulations!

Can you say how the it's similar and how it's different to superficially similar sounding work?

(1) https://github.com/linebender/vello , dual Apache/MIT, by Raph Levien et al

(2) https://sluglibrary.com/ , proprietary, by Eric Lengyel (Terathon)
by lancekey | 2025-09-03 11:13:15+00:00
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by austin-cheney | 2025-09-03 11:13:18+00:00
As a TypeScript lover here are the things I dislike about Java:

* Comparably slow startup. It seems to take so much long to compile the code and startup the JVM for a large application compared to a similar JavaScript/TypeScript application.

* Yes, Java is verbose and that can be annoying but this super low on my list. I can work with this.

* Java forces OOP on you. The original benefit of OOP is efficient memory conservation, but these benefits are lost on garbage collected languages. The primary reason OOP continues to exist is stylistic preference and it’s a preference I don’t like.

* Error states and stack traces feel like a drunk person throwing up. They are all over the place, far too large, and feel like they blame the user for even daring to execute the code.

It’s not all bad. People who write Java seem like they know what they are doing, and I am fully aware this me being naive. Most corporate JavaScript people absolutely have no idea what they are doing. The difference in insecurity and output is strikingly visible from a distance.
by lxgr | 2025-09-03 11:14:10+00:00
> > Let’s not mention the fact the particular large language model, LLM called Chat GPT they chose, was never the right kind of machine learning for the task of describing images.

> Weird. I would think LLMs are exactly the right kind of tool to describe images.

TFA is from 2023, when multimodal LLMs were just picking up. I do agree that that prediction (flat capability increase) has aged poorly.

> I doubt OCR and even self-driving cars will get any significant advancements.

This particular prediction has also aged quite poorly. Mistral OCR, an OCR-focused LLM, is working phenomenally well in my experience compared to "non-LLM OCRs".
by enugu | 2025-09-03 11:14:50+00:00
For someone new, this was a really interesting read. Thanks for the effort. The picture of how the sky looks from underwater was so surprising to learn.

Regarding the 'first-principles' discussion, it is a relative term in usage despite the name. Explaining from a layer of abstraction below normal explanations.

Someone explaining how a computer works starting with machine instructions is doing first-priniciples, even if they wont explain details of atoms. The literal meaning would be almost impossible to implement, for instance none of Newton's work would be first principles given today's knowledge. Similarly, current physics can be subsumed in future principles.
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-03 11:14:54+00:00
We’ve self censored regarding the state narrative on Israel/Palestine our entire lives in the west

Just because the censorship is outsourced to the private sector, mostly, doesn’t make the day to day any different when you rely on support of the private sector, alongside discretionary support from the state

Visa holders are experiencing detainment for this specific thing, this cycle. And in other western democracies anyone can be fined and imprisoned for it as well

Wishful thinking that there is imperviousness to disagreeing with the state narrative in the west

The reality is that it’s not always on the mind 100% of the time and you learn to appreciate the day to day life under Eastern and Western authoritarian systems
by jonstewart | 2025-09-03 11:16:42+00:00
Immigration laws are civil, not criminal, and there’s a wide degree of latitude, which is all legal. It’s not binary. This administration has turned the dial to 11, including several actions which have not been consistent with the rule of law.

And at the same time, the US has a long history of bad laws that its citizens have rightfully opposed and acted in opposition to. Maybe John Brown took things too far (and maybe he didn’t when you consider slavery), but did Rosa Parks?
by eru | 2025-09-03 11:17:08+00:00
> Try using this argument in any engineering context and observe how quickly you become untrusted for any decision making.

We famously talk about the 'numbers of 9s' of uptime at eg Google. Nothing is 100%.

> Arguing that something doesn’t have 100% reliability and therefore something that makes it less reliable is okay is not real logic that real people use in the real world.

That wasn't my argument at all. What makes you think so?

I'm saying that going for 100% reliability is a fool's errand.

So if the device adds a 1/1,000,000 failure mode, that might be perfectly acceptable.

Especially if it eg halves your insurance payments.

You could also imagine that the devices have an override button, but the button would come with certain consequences.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-03 11:17:25+00:00
While the serpent had a dark role in the Epic of Gilgamesh too, it is extremely sad how the Genesis has twisted completely the beautiful story of how Shamkhat has civilized the wild Enkidu, whom God had made from clay (by showing him the pleasures of a city, as opposed to the harsh life in the wilderness: eating bread, drinking beer, being massaged with oil and making love), into the ugly story of how Eve has committed the unforgivable sin with Adam, of seeking knowledge on par with God, and her descendants shall be for ever punished for it.